Heartless: Man Alive Without Heart Or Pulse
Perhaps in the future, we’ll spend our youth — i.e. the first hundred or so years of our lives — with a heart and a pulse, and our next couple hundred without them. DesignTaxi writes:
Two doctors from the Texas Heart Institute successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a device—proving that it is possible for your body to be kept alive without a heart, or a pulse.
The turbine-like device, that are simple whirling rotors, developed by the doctors does not beat like a heart, rather provides a ‘continuous flow’ like a garden hose.
If you listened with a stethoscope, you wouldn’t hear a heartbeat. If you examined [the] arteries, there’s no pulse. Hooked up to an EKG, [he'd] be flat-lined.”
First Synthetic Organ Transplant
Could the success of synthetic organ transplants lead to the donor’s list becoming obsolete? While it’s still too early to tell, the first trial of a synthetic trachea transplant leaves surgeons hopeful. Via BBC News:
I’ve held a few strange body parts in my hands over the years – all I should stress, in the line of work. They have ranged from mechanical heart pumps to hi-etch prosthetic limbs.
But none more life-like than the synthetic trachea manufactured by scientists from University College London. The team, lead by Professor Alex Seifalian, have patented a nanocomposite material which was used to create the first completely synthetic windpipe.
It was transplanted into a patient whose own windpipe was damaged by cancer. The operation was done in Sweden at the Karolinska University Hospital in conjunction with the Karolinska Institute. You can read the background to the story by my colleague Michelle Roberts, who interviewed the patient and the…
Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs
Adapted from Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs: How Surgery Can Be Hazardous to Your Health – And What to Do About It by Harvey Bigelsen, MD. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.
“Well Mrs. So-and-So,” says Dr. Almighty, “since you are fifty years old and reaching menopause, you don’t need your uterus anymore; in fact it is probably getting in the way. Since we will be in there, we may as well take out your appendix because you don’t need it either, and taking it out will prevent future appendicitis. Most older women have gall bladder problems, so let’s take that out too, for prevention. Oh, and one of my friends is a plastic surgeon: While you are asleep and can’t feel anything, he can do a tummy tuck and smooth out some of your wrinkles with Botox. Don’t worry, it’s very, very poisonous, but we will just use it on your wrinkles. No big deal!”1
Sounds fabulous, doesn’t it? One-stop surgery: magically taking care of everything that could possibly affect you over the next ten years…
‘Skin Gun’ Heals Wounds By Spraying Living Skin Cells
Via National Geographic, an in-action look at an experimental “skin gun” that can heal burn victims in minutes. The device sprays skin cells in airbrush-like fashion, allowing for new layers of skin to be painted on. In a few decades, will this be a standard device in any emergency technician’s toolbelt?
Girl’s Severed Hand Reattached To Leg
Simultaneously joyous and disturbing news via premier British medical science journal Orange UK:
Surgeons in China saved a little girl’s hand – by grafting it on to her leg for three months. Nine-year-old Ming Li lost her hand when she was run over by a tractor on her way to school in July. But her arm was too badly damaged to reattach it to her wrist so doctors temporarily attached it to her right calf instead.
Dr Hou Jianxi, spokesman for the hospital in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, said the hand had now been transplanted back on to her arm. “When she came in, her left hand was completely severed from her body. It was very scary,” he told the Zhoukou Evening Post. “But Ming Li can now move her wrist again and her left hand is a healthy pink colour proving that the blood is circulating well.”
Li will need two more operations…
DIY Medicine From YouTube Videos
One of the positive things about the recession era is that it’s inspiring people to get creative — for instance, by performing their own minor surgeries, using how-to videos from YouTube. The Globe and Mail reports:
Before, doctors worried about patients who self-diagnosed after doing Internet research on questionable medical websites. But the social Web has given birth to a new beast: users who document their DIY medical procedures on camera and share the videos on YouTube.
Doug Southern would have preferred to see a doctor, but bad timing meant he was without health insurance. He was laid off from his job a short while before a three-year-old baseball-sized cyst on his back became infected.
When his brother-in-law, a family practitioner, and his sister came to visit him in Tuscaloosa, Ala., he decided to put down a towel and pillow on his kitchen floor and turn it into a makeshift operating room so his…
How To Become A Virgin
Najlaa Abou Mehri and Linda Sills report on the booming business of creating virgins, for the BBC:
Young Arab women wait in an upmarket medical clinic for an operation that will not only change their lives, but quite possibly save it. Yet the operation is a matter of choice and not necessity. It costs about 2,000 euros (£1,700) and carries very little risk.
The clinic is not in Dubai or Cairo, but in Paris. And the surgery they are waiting for is to restore their virginity.
Whether in Asia or the Arab world, an unknown number of women face an agonising problem having broken a deep taboo. They’ve had sex outside marriage and if found out, risk being ostracised by their communities, or even murdered.
Now more and more of them are undergoing surgery to re-connect their hymens and hide any sign of past sexual activity. They want to ensure that blood is spilled…
Hot New Cosmetic Surgery Trend: Eye Whitening
Down in the dumps? Stuck in a rut? It might be because your eyes aren’t white enough, making you unattractive and unlovable. Luckily, there’s a serious medical procedure to fix this; ABC reports on the growing popularity of eye-whitening surgery. It costs $3,000 to $5,000 (that’s per eye), possible side effects include dry eyes, scarring, and infection, and it’s almost as effective as using eye drops:
As a lawyer Steven Smith works long hours and reads a lot of fine print. But he blames years of sun exposure for making his eyes red.
It irritates him when people tell him how tired he looks. So when his ophthalmologist, Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler, described the new eye-whitening procedure called I-BRITE, Smith decided to give it a try. I-BRITE is basically a procedure called conjunctivoplasty, a procedure that’s been around for decades. Surgeons use this to remove pterygium, or growths in the eyes.
But taking away…
Robot Surgeons and Joystick Heart Surgeries
Video in this article shows the “Heartlander,” a miniature mobile robot that delivers therapy to the surface of a beating heart…using a joystick! Like the Star Wars 2-1B series medical droid, real medical robots can now provide surgery that’s minimally invasive — or even performed remotely — while offering greater precision, decreased blood loss, and smaller incisions with quicker healing time and less pain.
Other examples include the ViRob, a tiny “millibot” 1 millimeter in diameter and 5 millimeters long that can travel inside the human body to collect tissue samples, deliver medicine…
