Word: horganitis
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Last month, in an American surgical first, doctors at the University of California, San Diego, removed the appendix of a 24-year-old patient through her vagina. Surgeons Santiago Horgan and Mark Talamini made a small incision in the wall of the patient's vagina, through which they passed surgical tools and a small camera to the appendix, removing the organ through the same incision. Surgeons also made a small cut in the bottom of the patient's bellybutton and inserted another camera through it to help guide surgery. The procedure took 50 minutes from start to finish, 20 minutes...
...days later, the patient, Diana Schlamadinger, a biophysics graduate student at UCSD, was recovering with almost no pain: "I feel kind of like I did too many sit-ups," she said. Schlamadinger said she opted for transvaginal surgery after Dr. Horgan outlined its potential post-operative benefits - and assured her that he had similarly removed 12 gallbladders. That the surgery was experimental was another selling point. "This appealed to the scientist in me," Schlamadinger said. "I was really interested in being a part of something that could help other women in the future not suffer as much...
...intuitive next step to laparoscopic surgery - which, while significantly less invasive than open surgery, still requires several tiny incisions through the abdominal wall. Cutting through abdominal muscle is not only painful, but can also cause complications: up to 5% of (or 50,000) surgery patients later develop hernias, Horgan estimates. The new technique requires cutting too, but generally just one incision through internal tissue - of the stomach, vagina or colon - which is far less sensitive and which heals more quickly than external wounds. "What we are saying now is how do we improve laparoscopic surgery? How do we go from...
...expectation is that patients will cope better after the operation with the less-invasive new techniques - no external scarring, less pain (most of Horgan's patients take nothing stronger than Tylenol after surgery), shorter recoveries and no risk of hernia. Surgeons have created a national organization called the Natural Orifice Consortium for Assessment and Research, or NOSCAR, to track the procedure's success and safety, and to collect data on patients' progress. NOSCAR also monitors the risk of infection with natural-orifice surgery, which doctors anticipate will be significantly lower than with traditional laparoscopic procedures - since the longer it takes...
...heaped on U.S. President George W. Bush's Administration after it was slow to react to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster - are keenly aware of the importance of managing China's big freeze. "This government has made competence a cornerstone of their administration even more than their predecessors," says Horgan, the APCO consultant. So the state propaganda machine has been working flat out to show how officials are trying to ease the crisis. The main China Central Television channel regularly airs a special program called "Battling the Blizzard." An often repeated news clip shows Premier Wen Jiabao picking...