Brain Cancer Surgery Is Stuck 'In The Middle Ages' — Is There A Better Way?

[LiberalArkie]

http://digg.com/2015/tumor-removal-technology

In 2004, Dr Richard Ellenbogen spent almost 20 hours operating on a 17-year-old girl with a brain tumor. He ended up leaving a big piece of the tumor behind, mistaking it for normal brain tissue. Less than a year after the surgery, the cancer hit back and the young girl died.

The week the girl died, Ellenbogen presented the case at his team’s weekly meeting at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “There’s got to be a way to take more of the tumor out and leave more of the normal brain intact,” he sighed in frustration. The nagging feeling that he could’ve taken more tumor out wouldn’t leave him alone. Ellenbogen had faced a dilemma: if he had removed more, he would probably have removed more tumor but might also have removed normal brain tissue, with the risk that the girl would have been left severely disabled. Neurosurgeons have to be aggressive and sometimes push themselves to go further and deeper than they feel comfortable going, but they all operate under the adage ‘first, do no harm’.



The first recorded cases of cancer show how the Ancient Egyptians used cauterization (using red-hot instruments to burn off tissue and seal off wounds) to destroy tumors and to treat a variety of infections, diseases and bleeding lesions. Until the mid-18th century, surgery was the only effective option for addressing several conditions. But it was difficult and painful, as shown by the case of Madame Frances d’Arblay, an English novelist living in Paris.

Before operating in 1811, d’Arblay’s doctor didn’t shield her from the grueling pain she would encounter during the treatment for her advanced breast cancer — a mastectomy, without anesthetic. “You must expect to suffer, I do not want to deceive you—you will suffer—you will suffer very much!” d’Arblay later wrote that “when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves—I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly the whole time of the incision… the air felt like a mass of minute but sharp and forked poniards [daggers] that were tearing the edges of the wound.” Yet the operation was a success, and d’Arblay lived for another 29 years.


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Note: this is a good story

[Downwinder]

1. A very good story!!