Word: duodenum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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According to medical statistics, some 12 million Americans have, or have had, ulcers of the stomach or duodenum...
...doctors run frigid alcohol through it, at a temperature around -4° F. After an hour or so, the patient's stomach wall is presumably frozen. This freezing generally cuts down the stomach wall's ability to secrete hydrochloric acid, leaves less acid to spill into the duodenum and inflame any ulcers there. According to first reports by Dr. Wangensteen and Dr. Edward T. Peter, such treatment usually gives the ulcer victim freedom from pain for six months or longer. When it wears off, the freezing can be repeated...
...dangerous that it can be lethal; they insist it should be stopped. Less certain about their opposition, other surgeons are nonetheless bothered by a few cases in which freezing has caused the appearance of a new ulcer in the stomach itself-more dangerous than the original ulcer in the duodenum that freezing was supposed to relieve...
...operation has stirred some of the sharpest surgical controversy. In the American Journal of Surgery, Dr. Moore recently inveighed against the various stomach-cutting operations that have been tried as "cures"' for duodenal ulcer. "The removal of a large segment of normal stomach for a disease in the duodenum," he wrote, "is not only crippling, but wanting in elegance of rationale." Dr. Moore, who drives himself hard and ignores any possible effects on his own digestion, insists that the basic cause of ulcers is still unknown. The dazzling variety of stomach operations devised between 1886 and the mid-1900s...
...running a coolant solution through a swallowed balloon, might stop bleeding from ulcers in the stomach itself. It did. Then with his surgeon son Stephen, Dr. Wangensteen reasoned that actually freezing the stomach wall might cripple the acid-producing cells and thus keep acid from spilling into the duodenum. It does, at least for several months. After that, says Dr. Wangensteen, the procedure can be repeated-though in any but expert hands, it may be dangerous...