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Comment by NetOpWibby | Hacker News Reader

This mirrors my experience as well. It's so weird. Give us a break!!

This is standard hospital. Rest is the healer but they will not let you rest. Tests and loud noises, endlessly. It is quite insane.

For new mothers, they want to check that they're still alive and haven't started silently bleeding out, in which case they soon won't be alive.

Yes, I know. But restful healing is important too. And it has a good track record, better than the doctors in fact. They should work around the healing instead of interfering with it.

No one will win a malpractice lawsuit over lost sleep, different story for lost lives.

That's not really true.

Surely there's yet another kind of machine they could hook up, that could silently monitor you for blood loss / internal bleeding? Especially if they know where to expect that potential bleeding to appear? (The probe for that one would probably be pretty uncomfortable while you're awake, but that doesn't matter if they let you sleep!)

Not much replaces a physical examination with the physician or nurse present.

Serious complications can be quite subtle that unless you answer questions, they may be missed. Having someone come in, listen to your heart and lungs, ask a few questions can't really be replaced with machines.

I accept the answering-questions part — but it might be just barely possible today to build an "automatic stethoscope" machine, that sits there continuously listening to your heart and lungs, feeding the audio through an ML model, and alerting if it "hears" anything odd, no?

(It wouldn't even need to know what the odd thing represents; just that it's out-of-expectation enough to require someone to come over and check on you! A bit like asking a family's child to watch grandma while you speak to the mom and dad. All you want the child to do, is to freak out and get your attention if grandma does anything other than what she was already doing!)

A smart stethoscope won't monitor consciousness and lucidity, which are vital signals.

Okay? I already said "I accept the answering-questions part."

Doctors not having to manually probe any signs of heart/lung problems each time they're in the room, would mean that they get either get more time to test each patient for consciousness/lucidity; get time to check on more patients; or (my preferred option) are able to make each check-session shorter and less invasive (no need to sit the patient up to listen to their lungs through their back, for example), and thus less disturbing of a patient's sleep quality (because it's easier to go back to sleep after a short conversation, when you haven't had your blood pressure spike from sitting up.)

Standard patient monitoring indirectly monitors for blood loss. Decreased blood pressure, increased breathing rate, increased heart rate are all signs of blood loss. This can be and is done by machines.

The thing people don't seem to understand is the fact doctors also monitor consciousness. Depressed mental state is also a sign of blood loss. The patient's neurolopsychogical state is important information, it has diagnostic and prognostic value.

The most basic way of evaluating a patient's neuropsychological state is to bother them with questions.

Understand that there are so many complications that can happen after pregnancy that put the mother at risk that can’t just be mitigated by sleep

almost like it's a business and they don't want to lose any customers...

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