surgeon
CHICAGO (March 24, 2009) - New research published in the March issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons reveals shortages of qualified surgeons in many regions of Maryland, especially in rural areas. Excessive administrative demands and an aging physician and general population could push these shortages to critical levels over the next 10 years.
To look at Matthew Houdek, you could never tell he was born with virtually no left ear.
Physicians at Northwestern Memorial Hospital successfully removed a patient's gallbladder through the vagina, making them the first in the Midwest and the third in the country to perform the innovative procedure.
Engineers at the University of California at San Diego have come up with a way to help accelerate bone growth through the use of nanotubes and stem cells.
Researchers at the Duke University Eye Center have determined that patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) experience significant improvement in their quality of life following a surgical procedure called "macular translocation with 360 degree peripheral retinectomy" (MT360). AMD is an eye disease that may lead to vision loss in the central region of a person's visual field, a defect that can seriously impact a patient's quality of life.
Almost 60 years after it was conceived, Washington University orthopaedic surgeon Matthew B. Dobbs, MD, has revived a nonsurgical technique to correct talipes equinovarus, or clubfoot, a congenital foot deformity. By combining the venerable procedure with the latest genetic science and translational research, Dobbs aims to drastically improve treatment and perhaps eventually reduce the incidence of the malady.
The ophthalmologist who pioneered customized LASIK surgery -- supervision -- now aims to further improve patients' eyesight and minimize the risk of side effects. Patients should benefit from several recent discoveries, Scott MacRae, M.D., told an audience of eye doctors in a keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology last month. The techniques appear crucial for minimizing unwanted side effects and allowing patients, most of whom now have vision of 20/16 or better, to enjoy the full effects of a type of enhanced vision that wasn't even a twinkle in the eye of doctors 20 years ago.
Combining stented angioplasty and robotically assisted ''keyhole'' bypass surgery is safe and may help patients with extensive cardiovascular disease, researchers report. Doctors performed the hybrid approach on 12 patients, all of whom remain free of chest pain. ''This technique puts together the best of both worlds... However, it is important to emphasize that this is a small pilot study, and that robotically enhanced minimally invasive direct coronary artery bypass is a recent technique that is used in only a few centers worldwide.''
While limb-sparing surgery for bone cancer is becoming more common, very young children with bone cancer face significant challenges and have limited surgical options. A page in the August 19 electronic issue of the New England Journal of Medicine illustrates the case of a five-year-old girl with Ewing's sarcoma, a cancerous tumor, behind her left knee. Surgeons at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia used a limb-sparing technique called rotationplasty to remove the diseased portion of bone, turn the shortened portion of the leg bone in a half-circle and reattach it, with the ankle joint functioning as a knee. With a prosthetic attached to the mobile joint, the child, now 13, enjoys gymnastics and cheerleading.
The best approach to removing a diseased thyroid, the endocrine gland just under the Adam's apple that controls the body's metabolic rate, amazingly may be from under the arm, according to a study published in the August issue of the journal Laryngoscope. ''It was simply the easiest way to take these glands out that provided a cosmetic incision,'' said Dr. David J. Terris, Porubsky Professor and chair of the Medical College of Georgia Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the article's lead author. ''Because it requires coming from a little distance, it gives the surgeon additional perspective.''
Rush University Medical Center is among the first hospitals in the country to use a computer-assisted navigation system in orthopedic joint replacement surgery.
The image-guided navigation system is similar to the location and directional tracking systems used for cars and ships today -- it is, in effect, a global positioning system (GPS) for the surgeon. Informative positioning calculations are displayed on a graphically intuitive screen, which dynamically changes with the individual patient's anatomy.
U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona today released a new comprehensive report on smoking and health, revealing for the first time that smoking causes diseases in nearly every organ of the body. Published 40 years after the surgeon general's first report on smoking -- which concluded that smoking was a definite cause of three serious diseases -- this newest report finds that cigarette smoking is conclusively linked to diseases such as leukemia, cataracts, pneumonia and cancers of the cervix, kidney, pancreas and stomach.
Two deaf women in the US have become the first people to undergo the risky procedure of having implants in their brainstems, New Scientist reports.
The devices are designed to restore hearing by directly stimulating nerves. Some deaf people have been given implants that sit just outside the brainstem, but these do not work very well.
Feeding auditory signals directly into the brainstem should work better, but because the brainstem carries signals from the entire body to the brain, any damage caused by an implant could be disastrous.
The procedure is far more risky than, say, placing implants in the cortex to try to restore some vision. "If you damage the cortex it's not that big a deal. But at the brainstem level every neuron you damage could damage function," says Bob Shannon of the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles, the surgeon who pioneered the procedure. "We took 15 years to convince ourselves that this could be done safely."
Full Story
In an operating room in Carle Hospital in Urbana, Ill., on May 7, as scientists from the University of Illinois (UI) and Sandia National Laboratories watched, surgeon Michael Goldwasser fitted a highly unusual ceramic prosthetic device into the mouth of an elderly woman who had lost most of her teeth and along with it, much of the bone of her lower jaw.
U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, M.D., sees dentists as equal partners in war on terrorism, he told dental leaders March 27 at a conference on "Dentistry's Role in Responding to Bioterrorism and Other Catastrophic Events." The conference was co-sponsored by the American Dental Association and the U.S. Public Health Service. Dr. Carmona, a high school dropout and Army enlistee who later retrieved his education, is the 17th Surgeon General of the USPHS, sworn into office last Aug. 5. He opened the two-day conference with an overview of current threat that invited dentist participation in war on terror.
