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Video:

the colo-rectal surgeon

2 canadians(!) singing a song about colo-rectal surgeon

• 3.6667/5
• 481
• 7
• 3/14/2007
• by needle_jockey

Video:

surgeon saves life by text messages

a british doctor used text message instructions from a colleague to perform a life-saving amputation on a boy in africa.

vascular surgeon david nott helped the 16-year-old while working with medecins sans frontieres in the democratic republic of the congo.

the boy's left arm had been ripped off by a hippopotamus and was badly infected and gangrenous, reports the bbc.

mr nott, 52, knew he needed to perform a forequarter amputation, which requires the surgeon to remove the collar bone and shoulder blade.

he had never performed the operation before but followed instructions from a colleague who had.

the surgeon, who is normally based at charing cross hospital in london, said: "i texted him and he texted back step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

"even then i had to think long and hard about whether it was right to leave a young boy with only one arm in the middle of this fighting.

"but in the end he would have died without it so i took a deep breath and followed the instructions to the letter. i knew exactly what my colleague meant because we have operated together many times."

the surgeon had just one pint of blood and an elementary operating theatre, but the operation, performed in october, was a success and the teenager made a full recovery.

mr nott, who volunteers with msf for a month every year, said: "it was just luck that i was there and could do it."

source, source

• 4.7289/5
• 2275
• 19
• 12/3/2008
• by InsayneJayne

Video:

american surgeons plan first face transplant

us surgeons are to interview a shortlist of patients hoping to be the first to receive a face transplant following several tests on bodies donated to medical research.

now the cleveland clinic team will choose a patient whose face is disfigured to receive a "new" face from a dead donor.

the chance it will work is around 50% and experts have expressed safety and ethical concerns about the procedure.

the recipient would have to take powerful anti-rejection drugs for life, which carry considerable long-term health risks, says the royal college of surgeons of england, which formed a working party to look at the issue earlier this year.

also, it is not known how well an individual and their loved ones would adapt psychologically to a completely new face and it is hard to predict what the person would look like after a face transplant.

the procedure would involve taking skin and underlying tissues from a dead donor and placing them on the living recipient. computer modelling suggests the new face would neither resemble the donor nor recipient's pre-injury self but doctors believe the face should take on more of the characteristics of the skeleton of the recipient than the soft tissues of the donor.

the recipient should be able to eat, drink and communicate again through a wide variety of facial expressions and mannerisms.

after a year of discussions, the cleveland clinic won approval to go ahead with the operation from an internal review board, which included surgeons, psychiatrists, social workers, therapists, nurses and patient advocates.

surgeon maria siemionow and her team will interview five men and seven women as potential candidates for the 8-10 hour operation.

dr siemionow told associated press: "you want to choose patients who are really disfigured, not someone who has a little scar."

yet they will have to have enough healthy skin for traditional grafts in case the transplant fails.

they will be told that their face would be removed and replaced with one from a cadaver, matched for tissue type, age, sex and skin colour.

bbc news