THE SAFETY OF LUMBAR PUNCTURE FOR AMBULATORY PATIENTS
- 1 November 1934
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Medical Association (AMA) in Archives of Dermatology
- Vol. 30 (5) , 692-696
- https://doi.org/10.1001/archderm.1934.01460170084009
Abstract
During the past few months there arose the question of performing lumbar puncture in the outpatient department of the clinic for cutaneous and syphilitic disorders at the Stanford University Hospital. Heretofore all of the patients who submitted to this procedure had been hospitalized for at least twenty-four hours. It was realized, however, that to insist on this procedure would result in my being forced to forego valuable serologic control of treatment. The procedure in ambulatory patients was therefore established and has now been in use for more than a year, with results to be described later. Soon after Quincke1 first introduced the operation of lumbar puncture reports of accidents began to appear. By 1915 Schönbeck2 was able to collect reports of 71 fatalities following puncture, a great preponderance being among patients with increased intracranial pressure. Excluding patients with tumor of the brain and other obvious causes of increasedThis publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: