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Beware of doctors bearing new treatments or telling you it's all down to stress...
Doctors are bad for your health :
That ulcer ? It's just stress...
Arnall Patz helped solve the riddle of how 10,000 babies went blind.
Dr. Patz, who died Thursday at age 89, was the Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist who in 1954 showed that treating premature babies with pure oxygen had the unexpected result of destroying eyesight in some. By the simple expedient of regulating oxygen levels inside incubators, the epidemic was quelled.
"Never in the history of ophthalmology has a blinding condition become so quickly widespread and equally rapidly been abolished," wrote Sir Stewart Duke-Elder, a Scottish ophthalmologist, in the 1970s.
A epidemic of retrolental fibroplasia (RLF) seemed to have grown up just as treatments for preemies had improved. By the time of Dr. Patz's investigations in the early 1950s, an estimated 10,000 children had been blinded in the U.S. and abroad, according to a history of the disease by William Silverman. Ophthalmologists were searching for a cause in the way preemies were treated—possible culprits included vitamins and hormones.
Dr. Patz, who died Thursday at age 89, was the Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist who in 1954 showed that treating premature babies with pure oxygen had the unexpected result of destroying eyesight in some. By the simple expedient of regulating oxygen levels inside incubators, the epidemic was quelled.
"Never in the history of ophthalmology has a blinding condition become so quickly widespread and equally rapidly been abolished," wrote Sir Stewart Duke-Elder, a Scottish ophthalmologist, in the 1970s.
A epidemic of retrolental fibroplasia (RLF) seemed to have grown up just as treatments for preemies had improved. By the time of Dr. Patz's investigations in the early 1950s, an estimated 10,000 children had been blinded in the U.S. and abroad, according to a history of the disease by William Silverman. Ophthalmologists were searching for a cause in the way preemies were treated—possible culprits included vitamins and hormones.
Doctors are bad for your health :
Would an ice pick driven through the eggshell thin bone above your eye into your brain cure your ‘maladies’, your ‘melancholy’, your ‘madness’? During the middle decades of the 20th century transorbital lobotomy, or ‘ice pick’ lobotomy, a radically invasive form of brain surgery, was used extensively for patients with psychiatric illnesses. It was a rapidly executed procedure, taking perhaps a few tens of minutes in total, requiring no more than a local anaesthetic, conducted for the purposes of ‘psychosurgery’.
This was the era before effective pharmacotherapies or psychotherapies for psychiatric illnesses; an era before there was an outline understanding of the psychological functions supported by the frontal lobes. We now know much about the frontal lobes: they support ‘executive functions’ within the brain such as planning, intending, imagining alternatives, initiating actions, directed remembering, and deferring gratification. In short, what makes us human.
In the unfortunate patient, the frontal lobes would be cut away from the rest of the brain by a simple and quick side-to-side motion, leaving the person with irreversible and enduring consequences. There were good intentions behind the procedure —curing the ‘incurable’ by radically intervening in the brain. However, transorbital lobotomy rendered many of its victims docile, mute and compliant. This therapeutic surgical strategy was a terrible but instructive failure of medical ethics, of patient treatment, and of neurological understanding of brain function and dysfunction. The legacy is what can go wrong. Medical ethics, safeguards and precautions have evolved so that similarly reckless experiments can never be conducted again.
This was the era before effective pharmacotherapies or psychotherapies for psychiatric illnesses; an era before there was an outline understanding of the psychological functions supported by the frontal lobes. We now know much about the frontal lobes: they support ‘executive functions’ within the brain such as planning, intending, imagining alternatives, initiating actions, directed remembering, and deferring gratification. In short, what makes us human.
In the unfortunate patient, the frontal lobes would be cut away from the rest of the brain by a simple and quick side-to-side motion, leaving the person with irreversible and enduring consequences. There were good intentions behind the procedure —curing the ‘incurable’ by radically intervening in the brain. However, transorbital lobotomy rendered many of its victims docile, mute and compliant. This therapeutic surgical strategy was a terrible but instructive failure of medical ethics, of patient treatment, and of neurological understanding of brain function and dysfunction. The legacy is what can go wrong. Medical ethics, safeguards and precautions have evolved so that similarly reckless experiments can never be conducted again.
That ulcer ? It's just stress...
The identification of Helicobacter pylori by Barry J. Marshall and J. Robert Warren in 1983 can not be, in any case, considered as serendipitous: without the endeavour, youthful curiosity, talent and ambition of the former and solid classical knowledge in pathology of the latter, peptic ulcer might be considered even today as an acid-related or psychosomatic disease, as it was during the past century.
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