Word: treatments
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...earlier seem comfortable. Some are provided with pumps they can activate as needed to inject pain killers through intravenous lines. Others have epidural catheters inserted in their backs, delivering medication into the space around the spinal cord to numb the lower part of the body. Such treatment provides steady control of pain, Berde says, and eliminates the need for the repeated shots most children dread...
...pain-treatment service came about because Berde and colleague Navil Sethna, faced with patients who had seemingly intractable problems, devised novel solutions, and because other doctors began to seek them out. One of their first cases was an 18-year-old boy with cancer. Suddenly, the boy's pain had spun out of control. "In three days he went from no morphine to 400 milligrams an hour, which is a pretty industrial dose," says Berde. "A normal amount might be 3 milligrams an hour...
Berde and his colleagues inserted a spinal catheter and gave the boy a local anesthetic and an opiate. The patient had been screaming; now he became comfortable and alert and was able to go home. Although that treatment had been used to control pain in adults, Berde says, "I don't know if it had been used much in kids. We had no protocol for it. But he clearly was terminal and not relieved by massive amounts of morphine...
...other hand, gunshot victims who live to tell about it often owe their survival to the vast improvements in emergency trauma care since the 1960s. Not only are response times faster, but treatment often begins right at the scene as highly trained paramedics work under the direct radio supervision of physicians back at the hospital. In the most serious cases, paramedics may have already started intravenous fluids, inserted breathing tubes and alerted doctors about what to expect even before the victim arrives...
...recipient, the process begins with massive doses of chemotherapy or radiation, or both, to wipe out the disease. But that treatment kills the patient's bone-marrow cells as well. Without this spongy tissue at the core of many larger bones, a person cannot live. Marrow contains the precious stem cells that produce all the body's 30,000 trillion red blood cells, many of its infection-fighting white cells and the platelets that are essential for clotting...