Word: patients
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dauntlessly enthusiastic over the prospect of receiving an artificial heart. "If you get it in right," Jack Burcham, a former railroad engineer, promised Implant Surgeon William DeVries, "I'll make it work." Getting it in right proved to be just the first of many difficulties faced by doctor and patient at Humana Hospital Audubon in Louisville. The cheerful father of four from Leroy, Ill., never really recovered from the initial surgery. Last week, just ten days after becoming the fifth and oldest human recipient of the Jarvik-7 heart, Burcham died, at 62. As DeVries later admitted...
Like his predecessors, Barney Clark, William Schroeder, Murray Haydon and Swedish Patient Leif Stenberg, Burcham was a dy- ing man who gambled on the artificial heart to win a few extra months of life. "We were hoping that he would be able to live like Schroeder," said Jack B. Burcham, 41, the < patient's son, "but Dad was just too weak." (Schroeder has survived more than 150 days with his artificial heart; Barney Clark died after 112 days...
Though cardiac tamponade is easily recognized in a patient with a normal heart, the presence of the artificial device masked the usual signs. By the time a sudden drop in blood pressure alerted doctors to the danger, said DeVries, lifesaving efforts "were doomed to failure." The surgeon was summoned to the hospital from downtown Louisville, where he was attending a conference on heart replacement, but he arrived too late: Burcham had already stopped breathing and had no blood pressure. "I was there for about 15 minutes, 20 minutes," DeVries said, "before we turned the key (to the Jarvik-7 power...
...drawbacks of the artificial heart have led many doctors to conclude that the device should be used only as a temporary measure to sustain a patient until a human donor heart can be found. "I'm not sure that it should be considered a permanent transplant," says famed Houston Heart Surgeon Michael DeBakey...
...Medical School, computer programs have been developed to simulate patients with a variety of diseases. With these programs, students can ask the "patient" questions or order medical tests, and plausible answers or test will results will instantly appear on the screen. By framing hypotheses and testing them in this fashion, students can eventually make a diagnosis and either have it confirmed or ask the computer where their reasoning went astray...