Word: doctors
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Bone-setting was a doctor's skill borne of necessity. In the days when any surgery meant great pain and usually an infection, closed treatment was the only sensible option. A good closed reduction still makes any bone doctor worth his salt proud. Walk up to some poor guy looking forward to a life of pain, deformity and stiffness, pick up his wrist, give it just the right yank and wham! he's cured. Makes you feel like Fonzi kicking the Coke machine. (See TIME's special report "How to Live 100 Years...
...statistical case for doing the surgery much more frequently has been made of late in various research papers. It may be on account of this research or maybe on account of other, less scientific factors, (read: lots more money for doctor, hospital and surgical parts company) but one way or another American orthopedists have gone from hardly every operating on these common wrist fractures to almost always operating on them. Somewhat better outcomes have been reported in large studies of many broken wrists treated surgically, but there are so many different surgical techniques and the level of skill (and effort...
...treatment was not perfect - but neither were the results with surgery. I would expect Carol's wrist to be somewhat stiff and occasionally achy either way. A scientist could appreciate that there is ultimately very little pure data here. Surgery would be my choice if and only if the doctor couldn't get (and hold) good position with a closed reduction and casting - and I thought he probably could. Finally I told Peter that in 20 years I had operated on only about 200 fractures like Carol's, while the justifiably famous professor down the block had done more than...
...that we can rely on statistics (sometimes) but in any individual case no one can ever knows how a given treatment will work, or how a different one would have. People must put their practical trust in something: progress or "science," friends, institutions, the government, sometimes maybe even their doctor. Today there seem to be many who just trust the money - that the more expensive must be the better choice. Faith in the marketplace, when ultimately commercial factors define good medicine, is a reality of modern medicine - a reality that can cheat patients out of the best treatment...
...Laden is alive, he is probably too deep in hiding to be anything other than a symbolic figurehead for al-Qaeda and the many jihadi groups it has spawned globally. Day-to-day management of the operation is said to be handled by his No. 2, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was nearly killed in a drone attack in the Pakistani tribal territory several years back. Nevertheless, the capture of top Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders in Karachi may help solve the mystery: Is bin Laden still alive, and if so, where is he hiding...