Word: neurosurgeons
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Surgery is the last recourse of the pain patient. "I spend an awful lot of my time telling people not to have it," says Neurosurgeon Poletti of Massachusetts General Hospital. Although operations to destroy nerves can provide immediate relief, the benefits rarely last more than six months to a year and may be followed by intense, burning pain that is worse than the original complaint. Surgery is often reserved for terminal-cancer patients. For such patients, neurosurgeons have devised delicate operations to cut nerves causing local pain, and even to sever nerve tracts in the spinal cord and brain...
...phenomenon known as sub mersion hypothermia: the extreme cold of the surrounding water, and of water breathed into the lungs, cools the body (to about 85° F in Jimmy's case), slowing down the metabolic rate and thus reducing the brain's oxygen requirements. Says Pediatric Neurosurgeon David McLone, of Children's Memorial Hospital: "Had he been warm, there would have been no chance...
Moreover, from society's standpoint, cocaine has a special perniciousness. "It takes a disproportionately high toll," says Dr. William Pollin, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, "because it is largely used by people who are most likely to have an impact on their environment. Think of the neurosurgeon operating on your child, or the mechanic working on the 747 you are taking...
...most difficult ethical question facing medicine today is: Are the donors really dead? As a neurosurgeon, I speak for the speechless, the so-called brain dead. When I must make the decision to terminate life support for my patient so that another may live, I feel unclean. I decry the dehumanization of our profession today. We are being asked to place the welfare of the next patient on a recipient list above the best interests of our own patient. The criteria for brain death can be too loosely applied these days, especially if there is a publicity campaign...
...comic strip entitled MacDoodle St. In one episode, Malcolm Frazzle--the hero, a poet who wears his hair long and a beard--met some Wayne Newton fans. "Wayne Newton?" Frazzle asks. "I'd rather listen to the sound of wild boars being vivisected by a psychotic neurosurgeon." Might as well damn baseball as boring, or stock car racing as a waste of gasoline. Might as well drive off the interstate to search for authentic small-town restaurants, instead of stopping at McDonalds. Might as well laugh at the literalists and the fundamentalists and the millenialists and all those people...