The heated hospital gown

helfenburg

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Thursday April 11, 2013 · 10:38 AM PDT

2013/04/11 · 10:38

Or, what's wrong with the American health care system.

My husband had to go to the hospital for a minor, routine surgical procedure yesterday. The first surprise was the heated hospital gown. No longer does the patient don the old-fashioned, well-worn and washed, cotton fabric hospital gown. The new gown is insulated paper and it is heated! It's like an electric blanket with holes for arms and ties for securing it around one's body. And it's not heated by wires but by a hot-air blower. Seriously. It has a plastic portal for connecting a hose to it; it's something like the hose on your vacuum cleaner - about 1.5 inches in diameter - and some device on the wall blows warm air through the hose into the gown to keep the patient warm. Also this bizarre mechanism includes a control device, something like the control device for an electric blanket, or any other ordinary electrical device. The control device has a dial, so the patient can turn the heat up or down and regulate his temperature. My husband was also given a blanket.

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