Word: mullan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sean F. Mullan begins with a simple injection of anesthetic into the side of the neck, just below the skull-one place where the spinal cord and its multiplex nerve cables are not completely encased in bone. Then he inserts a hollow, stainless-steel needle, only one hundredth of an inch in diameter, and guides the needle toward the nerves he wants to deaden with the aid of instant X rays that an assistant hands to him every ten seconds. One group of nerve fibers in the spinal cord serves the legs, another the trunk, and a third the arms...
Satisfied that the needle's tip has found its mark, Dr. Mullan sends a weak, 4-volt current through it for about ten minutes. During this time he checks the painful areas with repeated pinpricks, and the still-conscious patient reports to the surgeon when he can no longer feel...
Although none of the spinal cord is literally cut, the effect is temporarily the same: some nerve fibers are killed, and others are so damaged by the electric current that they take months to revive. More than half of the first 250 patients treated by Dr. Mullan with his new technique have been in the final stages of cancer. For others, suffering from shingles, some forms of arthritis, and nerve damage resulting from injuries, relief has lasted an average of six months. If and when the pain returns, the operation can be repeated...
...Brain Hemorrhages. A weak electrical current, suggests Irish-born Dr. Sean F. Mullan of the University of Chicago, may be the answer to an age-old problem: how to stop bleeding in a brain artery. These hemorrhages, usually at a spot where a cerebral artery has ballooned out and leaked or burst, are notoriously hard to shut off promptly. The most obvious plug for a burst artery is a blood clot, but with a clot the problem is how to make it and how to keep it from traveling and causing still more brain damage. Dr. Mullan and fellow workers...
...first and most dangerous days after a hemorrhage. But clots formed in this way are apt not to be permanent, whereas if a piece of copper is implanted in the aneurysm and left there for a week, without an electric current, it forms a more permanent clot. So Dr. Mullan's team is now combining the two methods: forming a quick clot by electricity, and then leaving in place a copper needle inserted through the same hole in the skull. The two forms of electro-clotting technique have worked well in 16 out of 19 patients...