Hallucinations in Hospital Pose Risk to Elderly

[groovedaddy]

No one who knows Justin Kaplan would ever have expected this. A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian with a razor intellect, Mr. Kaplan, 84, became profoundly delirious while hospitalized for pneumonia last year. For hours in the hospital, he said, he imagined despotic aliens, and he struck a nurse and threatened to kill his wife and daughter.

“Thousands of tiny little creatures,” he said, “some on horseback, waving arms, carrying weapons like some grand Renaissance battle,” were trying to turn people “into zombies.” Their leader was a woman “with no mouth but a very precisely cut hole in her throat.”

Attacking the group’s “television production studio,” Mr. Kaplan fell from his hospital bed, cutting himself and “sliding across the floor on my own blood,” he said. The hospital called security because “a nurse was trying to restrain me and I repaid her with a kick.”

Mr. Kaplan’s hallucinations lifted as doctors treated his pneumonia. But hospitals say many patients are experiencing such inexplicable disorienting episodes. Doctors call it “hospital delirium,” and are increasingly trying to prevent or treat it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/science/21delirium.html?th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1277136047-fq5TpUeHlFdTT7A8Qu9SGg

[enlightenment]

1. Fascinating.

Thank you for posting.

My mother, in her late 80s, suffered a mercifully short delirium in hospital; the doctors felt it was due to dehydration, which didn't make much sense to me as she had been on IV hydration for over 24 hours when it started.

[groovedaddy]

2. you're welcome. Given the uncertainty about what causes this, my guess is that there is a lot of

guessing on the part of medical professionals when this happens.

[enlightenment]

3. Indeed.

At least they seem to be acknowledging the extent of the problem now - hopefully that will improve outcomes in the future.

[postulater]

4. My dad had this after being given Haldol. He was never the same again.

[Crunchy Frog]

5. I think the hospital where our elderly family member stayed

tried to cause it deliberately.