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Posts with tag surgery

Surgeon Coached Through Emergency Amputation Via Text Message



This past October, a British doctor volunteering in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo performed an emergency amputation on a severely injured young man, the BBC and Textually.org reported earlier today. Dr. David Nott operated on the boy under the direction of his London colleague, Dr. Meirion Thomas. Or, rather, under the direction of Dr. Thomas's text messages.

Although Dr. Nott was uncertain of how the boy had lost all but six inches of his arm (stories ranged from a hippopotamus bite to crossfire), he was certain that -- due to a lack of immediate medical attention -- the boy would die from gangrene, unless an amputation were promptly performed.

But, since amputations are seldom performed in England, Dr. Nott was unsure of the proper procedure. Fortunately, though, he had once seen Dr. Thomas successfully perform the necessary operation, and had his cell phone number handy.

Several trans-equatorial text messages later, with Dr. Thomas offering step-by-step guidance, Dr. Nott had successfully amputated his patient's arm. With his patient fully recovered, Dr. Nott is grateful for his London associate and, undoubtedly, for SMS technology. [From: BBC via Textually.org]


Telemedicine's Rise Means More Doctors Are Phoning It In




The booming cost of health care in the United States and the successful deployment of international telecommunications infrastructure has created a booming market in Telemedicine, the practice of providing medical services from remote locations. US Hospitals are currently sending a large number of your x-rays, MRIs and CT scans to Bangalore, India to be processed and analyzed. Most of the outsourcing occurs during the middle of the night, during which there is the greatest shortage of available radiologists.

Banagalore is fast becoming the global center of Telemedicine, where a $1,500 US cost per scan is 35% cheaper than the US. The scans are performed by Western-educated Doctors who are able to leverage the extensive outsourcing infrastructure built up over the past 10 years of India's outsourcing boom.

A major obstacle to continued growth is a lack of supporting international regulatory framework for malpractice. Who will be liable if a mistake is made, if there is a mis-diagnosis? But the cost savings and the quick turnaround, 20-45 minutes, make the service indispensable. If you are concerned, ask your doctor if and when you get a scan. Your doctor should make all the information about the Teleradiologist available. [From Reuters]

Surgically-Implanted Contact Lenses Could Cure Host of Eye Problems

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1054433/No-need-glasses-Bionic-super-lenses-correct-long-AND-short-sightedness-developed.html?ITO=1490
Scientists are working to develop a sort of miracle cure for many eye problems. The super lenses can correct near sightedness and far sightedness as well as repair or even prevent cataracts.

The technology is an attempt to combine the stiff plastic lenses that have been implanted in patients after cataract surgery for decades with the relatively newer, flexible intraocular lenses that correct near- or far-sightedness. The lenses would be implanted during a surgery similar to cataract surgery -- a small incision would be made in the eye and the natural lens removed, then the new "super" lens would then be inserted and the eye closed up without stitches.

The lenses are still five to ten years from hitting the market and are expected to cost less than $3,500 (though how much less remains to be seen). [From: Daily Mail]
Engadget

Doctors Use Laser to Destroy Brain Tumor in Conscious Patient

Neurosurgery with robotic assistance is getting pretty old hat nowadays, so it looks like scientists are trying to up the difficulty factor by keeping their patients awake -- a team of French doctors just completed the first successful removal of malignant brain tumor from a still-conscious patient, using a computerized laser and an MRI scanner to guide the probe.

The fiber-optic laser was fed into the brain through a 3mm (.12 inch) hole in the patient's skull and guided via MRI to the tumor, where it fired for two minutes and completely destroyed the cancerous tissue. Once the tumor cells were dead, the cable was removed and the patient was allowed to return home -- all within a single day.

That's pretty impressive, and it comes on the heels of 15 similar trials where five out six patients who underwent the total removal procedure were cancer-free nine months after surgery. The team says further research will cost an additional two million euros to progress, but if this technique works as well as they claim after peer review, we'd guess that money won't be hard to come by. [From: Telegraph via Fark]

Robo-Doc Makes Surgery Safe, Quick, and Less Painful

Robo-Doc Make Surgery Safer, Quicker, Less Painful
Most of us are nervous enough having a human open us up and play around with our inside parts, but the thought of letting our mortal enemies, the robots, do it is just unthinkable. David Roughly decided to trust his prostate cancer surgery to a four armed metallic doc anyway, and was pleasantly surprised with the results.

Because of the agility and precision of the robo-doc, Roughly suffered less discomfort and recovered more quickly than he would have from traditional surgery to remove his prostate. Instead of being laid up in bed for 10 days hopped up on morphine, Roughly was up on his own and out of the hospital in just two days, and needed only paracetamol for the pain.

The procedures performed by the robot surgeon also require less anesthetic and reduce the risk for infection in patients. Maybe there's a bright side to our new robot overlords. [Source: Daily Mail]

Doctor Uses Electric Drill to Remove Brain Tumor

Englishman Uses Drill on Ukranian Woman's Head to Save Her LifeThink of brain surgery and you probably think of a room full of doctors and nurses each holding specialized equipment, surrounding a patient draped in sterilized blankets in a room of polished stainless steel and glass.

Imagine a guy holding a rechargeable handheld drill and using it on someone's head, though, and you'd probably think it was a scene from a horror movie and not a medical documentary. But in an upcoming documentary to be shown on the U.K's BBC, that's exactly what a British doctor uses for an emergency surgery on a woman in the Ukraine.

The woman, Marian Dolishny, was fully conscious when Dr. Henry Marsh used a 9.6 volt rechargeable drill from manufacturer Bosch to drill into her skull. Thankfully she was at least given a local anesthetic, but it must have been quite a sensation to have an off the shelf drill bit chewing into her noggin.

Dr. Marsh is a frequent visitor to Ukraine, where he charitably performs no-charge surgeries. On this particular occasion, he didn't have the official tools required for this sort of surgery, but, as he mentions in the documentary, his use of the electric drill "shows how with improvisation you can achieve a lot."

From NEWS.com.au

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Power Outage in Russia Forces Doctors to Use Cell Phones for Light

Cell Phones Illuminate Child Birth
Cellphones are quickly becoming the goto method of illumination for hospitals around the world when power fails. We've reported on an appendectomy in Argentina performed by the light of a mobile handset. Then, in March, Vietnamese doctors delivered a baby via caesarian-section illuminated by cell phones. Now another child has been brought into this world with the help of cell-phone screens.

Dozens of cell phones illuminated the delivery room of a hospital in Shelehov, a town in north Russia. When the town lost power, nurses quickly collected mobile phones from patients and employees to aid in the delivery of Rima Pivovarova's child. Both the mother and child are doing well, and it's all thanks to the cell phones.

From Textually.org

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A Scientific Formula for Perfect Breasts?

A 'Scientific' Formula for Perfect Breasts?

This week, at the first international conference on breast enlargement taking place in London, Patrick Mallucci will present a formula that he claims makes up the perfect set of breasts. He is sharing his discovery in the hopes of helping other plastic surgeons that also perform breast enlargements.

According to Mallucci, it's all about the location of the nipple. He says that on the perfect breast, "the nipple sits not at the half-way mark down the breast, but at about 45 percent from the top."

Just what kind of research, field-testing and evidence gathering went into this calculation? Nudie magazines. According to the U.K.'s Daily Mail paper, Mallucci spent hours pouring over photos of topless women in magazines and newspapers (in the U.K., papers such as The Sun feature photos of topless models every day).

His 'findings' combined with his own personal tastes formed a schematic of the perfect breast on which Mallucci now bases breast augmentation surgeries.

"All of the models I looked at conformed to these parameters. None of them were augmented and yet they were clearly considered to have beautiful breasts, so I wanted to examine how that could be achieved in someone not so well-endowed by using an implant."

Mallucci is the co-founder of the site MyBreast.org, a site where surgeons can share best practices and where women can find reputable doctors. According to Mallucci, the British model Caprice (above, right) is in possession of a perfect pair of breasts, while Victoria Beckham (above, left) has the breasts his clients most often cite as the ones they do not want.

What do you think? Is this guy a crackpot or is he onto something? Is there really such a thing as the perfect breast, or is beauty in the eye of the...ehem...beholder?

From Daily Mail

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Cell Phones Illuminate Emergency Surgery

Surgery by Cellphone Light
Sure this sounds almost impossible, but Reuters is reporting it, we're not just making this stuff up. On July 21, a blackout hit the city of Villa Mercedes in the San Luis province of Argentina. Leonardo Molina was on the operating table when the lights went out, undergoing an emergency appendix surgery.

The backup generators should have immediately switched on, but for some reason they failed. That's when one of Leonardo's family members got crafty and started collecting cell phones from others in the halls outside the operating room. The surgeons used the cell phones to provide the illumination they needed to complete the surgery.

This is just a few short months after Vietnamese doctors used cell phones during a black out to finish delivering a child.

From Textually.org

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