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Meeting the demand for kidney transplants is a big problem worldwide. In the UK, for example, only 18% of patients waiting on the kidney transplant list and 28% on kidney/pancreas transplant list received a transplant during 2008-09. Donations from living people only made up 37% of the total UK kidney transplant programme in the same [...]
Would you let a completely unmanned robot operate on you? Or what about one manned by a surgeon thousands of miles away? Sounds out of the question, the stuff of science fiction. But you’d be wrong, robotic surgery is here and has huge implications for medical efficiency and safety, as the Sci-Fi Surgery: Medical Robots [...]
The BMJ has just published an interesting paper on the factors that determine whether family agree to donate the organs of a brain dead relative. According to the meta-analysis by researchers at the University of Oxford, careful timing and having a transplant coordinator make the request are key factors in whether relatives consent to organ [...]
So, it’s Friday. You’re tired and don’t want to plough through a post on some complicated issue. Perfect time to revive my neglected Weird medical stories series then. And here’s today’s bizarre case study: surgeons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago have successfully removed a woman’s gallbladder through her vagina. Heather Lamb, a junior high [...]