Doctors in intensive care units spend their shifts tracking how much urine their patients produce, because a drop can be an early warning sign of kidney trouble. When a team in London applied the same measurement to the doctors themselves, the physicians came out looking worse than the critically ill people they were treating.
In a BMJ case-control study published on December 14, 2010, junior doctors at St George's Hospital met the low urine output threshold on 22% of their shifts, compared with 15% of patient days. The doctors had about twice the odds of meeting it, and the study's data monitoring committee stopped the research early "on safety grounds."
