Word: buerger
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...make his case fascinatingly arguable (and to nail his M.D. from the University of Paris). In The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, Torrilhon spies out a small, red-coated figure lacking both feet and half an arm, lying on its back. His diagnosis: amputations following "a typical case of Buerger's disease, i.e., gangrene caused by thromboangiitis obliterans" (an inflammatory disease affecting blood vessels). In the same picture another male figure drags wasted legs behind him as he creeps along on both hands. Writes Torrilhon: either syphilitic tabes or poliomyelitis...
...modern Lancet is less angry−principally because most of the reforms it advocated have been put into effect− it is nonetheless outspoken and alert. In 1952, a few days after King George VI of Great Britain died, the Lancet frankly discussed the King's ailments (Buerger's disease, lung cancer and arteriosclerosis) and the immediate cause of his death (coronary thrombosis). It has also reported candidly about the low standards of general practice under the British National Health Service, about bad conditions in mental hospitals, about the problems of the aged...
...organized itself properly over the years to take broad-front action. Not only the disease but the patient has been senselessly partitioned. A man's brain, if he had a stroke, was in the province of the general internist. The gangrenous toes of his friend who suffered from Buerger's disease went to the angiologist. His heart belonged to the cardiologist, who grudgingly took responsibility for high blood pressure-but could do little for it. His kidneys were annexed by the urologist. Pleaded Dr. Page at New Orleans this week...
Smoking certainly cuts down the blood flow in the capillaries of the extremities-the familiar effect of cooling the fingers. This same phenomenon can be deadly in victims of thromboangiitis obliterans (or Buerger's disease, from which the late King George VI suffered). Their limb-tip blood flow is already reduced so that they are subject to gangrene, and it is in this connection that the strength of the smoking habit is most clearly seen. Writes Cornell University's Professor Irving S. Wright: "We have seen patients . . . continue to smoke even though they suffered agonizing pain from gangrene...
Last week, coached by Psychologist Harold Crasilneck, the Southwestern team was using hypnosis on yet another patient: a 29-year-old victim of Buerger's disease, a circulatory ailment heavily aggravated by smoking. After hypnosis, the patient refused to touch cigarettes, retched when one was offered. Result: steady improvement. The team hopes to extend the technique to other chronic ailments, but, warns Crasilneck: "As we see it now, hypnosis has a very definite, specific role in medicine. We don't for a moment say it is a cure...