Word: comas
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...would-be suicide, rushed to a hospital in a coma and with a belly full of drugs, can be one of medicine's most devilish problems. Before they can prescribe an antidote, doctors must identify the drugs-and all too often the suicide is the only available source of information. How to ask him? Merely keeping him alive is a heroic chore. Oxygen, artificial respiration and a tracheotomy may all be called for simply to keep the comatose patient breathing and pumping blood...
...severe al coholic cirrhosis, and the pig-liver substitute worked well for only about six hours at a time, which was nowhere near long enough to let the patients' livers recover. But only two men failed to respond to the treatment, and five came out of their coma long enough to obey spoken commands. One asked for a cigarette on the operating table, and another was coherent for four days...
...liver stops working, he soon lapses into a deep coma and usually dies within a few weeks. Drugs offer little help, and transplants are all but hopeless. Even if the rejection mechanism could be overcome, there would still be the crucial problem of supply, which can only be met by cadavers; unlike kidney donors, who have a second kidney to keep them going, no man can donate his liver and live. But the liver has a remarkable ability to regenerate damaged cells and rebuild lost tissue-an ability which suggested to University of Kentucky Surgeon Ben Eiseman that...
...complex lab tests, Surgeon Eiseman ran human blood through excised pig livers, and found to his relief that they tolerated all blood types. This encouraged him to try hooking up pig livers to human patients. He and his colleagues chose eight patients in the last stages of liver coma and set up their operations as they would have for transplants. Each time, they removed the pig's liver and placed it in a steel perfusion chamber alongside the patient...
...wonder hormones cortisone and ACTH, administering them to rheumatoid arthritics with such spectacular results (one woman left her hospital bed to go on a shopping spree) that he won the 1950 Nobel Prize for medicine, sharing it with two biochemists who had isolated the hormones; of pneumonia and diabetic coma; in Ocho Rios, Jamaica...