Trick or treat!

Just in time for Halloween, we've got some spooky and disgusting medical news.

First, from the annals of how machines are out to get us (or the Journal of Craniofacial Surgery), a study of young healthy men who wear their cell phones on their hips found that pelvic bone density was slightly reduced on the side where they usually wear their phones. Apparently the phone holster was subjecting these men to not only ridicule by fashionistas, but electromagnetic fields. Based on the findings, researchers recommend keeping your phone "as far as possible" from your body, HealthDay reports.

And now, from the plastic surgeons' annual meeting, an image grosser than the bowl of brains at your neighborhood haunted house. A group of 50 women had fat liposuctioned from their thighs, bellies or "other areas" and injected into their breasts, according to HealthDay. The good news is that the procedure didn't impair cancer detection and took only slightly longer than a lunch hour. (Alternate fat reduction strategy: see some photos of this procedure and develop sudden motivation to skip lunch.)

Labels: surgery

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posted by Stacey Butterfield at 2:08 PM   0 Comments

Twittering in the OR

We're getting used to seeing everything on YouTube these days, and surgery is no exception. Now, technology is letting us eavesdrop as well. As CNN reported yesterday, physicians used Twitter to give a blow-by-blow account of removing a cancerous tumor from a man's kidney at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. (CNN notes that you can read the "Tweetstream" and link to the YouTube video here).

The surgeon's musings during the operation were dutifully recorded in real time on Twitter by the chief resident. "Tweeple" (Twitter users) worried along with the surgical team when the surgeon announced that the tumor was larger than expected and may require a radical nephrectomy. Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief after bleeding was controlled and a successful partial nephrectomy accomplished.

The surgeon said he agreed to Twitter because he wanted to show that a tumor could be removed without taking the entire kidney. Other Twitter enthusiasts say it engages people in medicine and makes complicated procedures more understandable. But is Twittering for everyone or is it an example of social networking run amok?

Labels: social networking, surgery

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posted by Janet Colwell at 9:47 AM   1 Comments

Not for the squeamish

We profiled the new field of NOTES (natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery) in ACP Hospitalist a while back. Diseased gallbladders, kidneys and the like were being taken out through mouths, vaginas and other pre-existing holes in the body. Now surgeons at Johns Hopkins have made a great leap forward, removing a kidney from a donor through her vagina and implanting it in her niece. How'd it go? "Easier than childbirth," the donor told the Washington Post. Reportedly, the next expected advance in the field will be to remove usable organs through the rectum. We don't want to know what donors will compare that experience to.

Labels: hospital medicine, surgery

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posted by Stacey Butterfield at 11:00 AM   0 Comments

More surgical procedures occurring outside of hospitals

More and more surgical procedures are being performed in freestanding ambulatory centers as opposed to hospitals, according to the recently released 2006 National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. The rate of visits to freestanding ambulatory surgery centers increased by 300% between 1996 and 2006, while at the same time the rate of visits to hospitals remained virtually unchanged.

Other notable findings from the survey include:

• Females had significantly more ambulatory surgery visits
  than men.
• Although the majority of visits had only one (56.3%) or two (28.5%) procedures performed, 2.6% had five or more procedures performed.
• Frequently performed procedures on ambulatory patients included endoscopy of large intestine, endoscopy of the small intestine, extraction of lens, injection of agent into spinal canal, and insertion of prosthetic lens.

There are many more interesting statistics in the CDC's Winter Quarterly Fact Sheet, which focuses on heart disease.

Labels: heart disease, hospital medicine, statistics, surgery

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posted by Janet Colwell at 8:46 AM   0 Comments