Stone Age brain surgery It might have been more survivable than you think скачать в хорошем качестве

Stone Age brain surgery It might have been more survivable than you think

Did Stone Age people conduct brain surgery? Medical historian Ira Rutkow points to evidence that suggests they did."There have been many instances of skulls that have been found dating back to Neolithic times that have grooves in them where portions of the skull have been removed. And it's evident if you look at these skulls, that this was all done by hand," Rutkow says. There's no written record of Stone Age neurosurgery, but Rutkow theorizes it may have been conducted by a shaman on patients who were comatose or who had been otherwise injured. What's more, he says, physical evidence indicates that some patients likely survived: "With many of these older skulls, new bone growth had already formed, and bone in the skull can only form if the patient is alive," he says. Rutkow is a surgeon himself. His new book, Empire of the Scalpel, traces the history of surgery, from the days when barbers did most operations and patients died in great numbers, to today's high tech operations that use robots with artificial intelligence. He says that when looking back, it's important to keep in mind the body of knowledge that existed at a particular point in history — and to not judge surgeons of yore too harshly."People write about medical history and they say, 'Oh, it was barbaric,' or 'The doctors were maltreating,'" he says. "We have to remember at all times that whatever I write about in the past was considered state of the art at the time. ... I would hate to think that 200 years from now, somebody is looking at what we are doing today and saying, 'Boy, that treatment that they were doing was just barbaric. How do they do that to people?'"On the four main obstacles for modern surgeryTo do an effective and safe surgical operation, there are four elements that are more important than anything else, more important than the mechanistic things that you need to do an operation. And these are an understanding of human anatomy. A surgeon needs a road map. They need to know where things are located. Second thing is how to control bleeding. If there's bleeding going on during an operation, that road map, that roadway gets flooded and the surgeon can't see anything. Third is anesthesia. They had to figure out how to reduce pain on patients. And the fourth is antisepsis. So these four elements — anatomy, bleeding, anesthesia and antisepsis — had to be discovered. They had to be improvised and they had to be worked on. The four elements, once they came in, were very, very important. But we've undergone a major transformation in surgery in the last 20 to 25 years, meaning ambulatory surgery, where you go home literally hours after the operation, [and] many operations through small incisions and laparoscopic repair, where it's through tubes that they put inside and the surgeon can see with a camera. This is a major revolution and transformation in surgery as large as anything else that's happened in the past. All data is taken from the source: http://npr.org Article Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-s... #surgery #newsyearsday #cnnnewstoday #newstodaycnn #bbcnewstoday #bbcnewsworld #