Word: wangensteen
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Deceptively Simple. The argument began in 1958, when the University of Minnesota's aggressively pioneering professor of surgery, Owen H. Wangensteen, described a deceptively simple treatment for a notoriously stubborn illness. He and his colleagues get the patient to swallow a plastic tube with a balloon at the end. When the balloon is in the stomach, the doctors run frigid alcohol through it, at a temperature around -4° F. After an hour or so, the patient's stomach wall is presumably frozen. This freezing generally cuts down the stomach wall's ability to secrete hydrochloric acid...
Last week a University of Oregon team argued that the Wangensteen method does not always freeze the stomach wall, and that when it does, it may do irreparable damage. The Oregon spokesman, Dr. E. Douglas McSweeney Jr., said that supercooling to a temperature just below freezing point might be more effective than the Wangensteen technique. They have tried this by putting a medical antifreeze, Dimethyl Sulfoxide, into the stomach or nearby arteries and cooling...
...American tradition. Gushing had been only 43 when he took the twin jobs. Of equal rank. Dr. Edward D. Churchill was only 35 when he became a full Harvard professor and a chief surgeon at the big (950-bed). old Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Owen H. Wangensteen was 32 when he was named head of surgery at the University of Minnesota...
...adventurous surgeons have devised still other ulcer treatments. From the fertile mind of Minnesota's Wangensteen came the idea that chilling the stomach, by running a coolant solution through a swallowed balloon, might stop bleeding from ulcers in the stomach itself. It did. Then with his surgeon son Stephen, Dr. Wangensteen reasoned that actually freezing the stomach wall might cripple the acid-producing cells and thus keep acid from spilling into the duodenum. It does, at least for several months. After that, says Dr. Wangensteen, the procedure can be repeated-though in any but expert hands...
...stomach regains too much of its acid-producing power, as it may in a few months, patients may have their stomachs quick-frozen again. And. insists Dr. Wangensteen. most of them could walk in off the street, get the treatment as outpatients, and go back to work...