Slashdot Mirror
Heart Surgeon Takes Notes from da Vinci
vivekg writes "Leonardo da Vinci probably never thought he had the proverbial Holy Grail to a revolution in heart surgery. Almost 500 years after da Vinci's death, intricate diagrams of the human heart made by him have inspired a British surgeon to pioneer a new way to repair damaged hearts."
Old science is not necessarily bad science. In fact, the hallmark of good science is how well is holds up over time and continued testing. Granted, Leonardo de Vinci was not "practicing" modern science. Rather, he was using the oldest form of science which is observational science. However, this approach is still valid and tends to be the most robust type of science which, like Leonardo discovered can also lead to the most controversial reactions from people who have investments in the current understanding of certain topics........... *cough* *cough*, like evolution.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Stop eating McDonalds you fatasses!
Reality test... am I dreaming?
But we do know he had the literal Holy Grail, hidden as part of the Priory of Sion. Or at least, he would have had, if it hadn't been made up by a delusional Frenchman in the 1950s
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It's funny how much you can get done once you blow bureaucracy out of the way. Exhuming corpses for study probably broke a billion laws back then as well, but so much has come from his approach.
Then again, I might be confusing the Da Vinci Code with reality. Damned fiction based on facts. It's probably safest to just say that I HEARD that he exhumed corpses. I didn't know him personally.
Well, there's only one way to perform surgery on a heart........ verrrrrrrrry carefully.
Disclaimer: this post is philosophical drivel...
I wonder how many insights from the past we as a "civilization" may be whistling past. In our smug (seemingly) mastery of technology I often feel a sense of something missing, or just not quite in the right place. Today we can instantaneously retrieve and play on our mp3 players any song that tickles our fancy, but to what end? When sales of Britney outstrip sales of the Emperor Concerto something is out of whack.
Base and rank commercialism has overtaken sensibility. Our choices are far less choices and far more subtle (and sometimes otherwise) manipulation of our choices by mass market driven money making machines.
For example, the food industry: did you know that one of the most healthy foods you can eat is tuna? And if you're trying to lose weight it can be a keystone in that goal. Did you know that some brands of tuna have artificially introduced certain appetite inducing chemicals? No intrinsic added value to the food, just a manipulation of you to buy more food (hopefully, their tuna).
Now, to relate all of this back to the original article. What percentage of medical breakthroughs and research have anything to do with cumulative knowledge? What percentage is just purely money driven?
It's only my opinion, but "we" as a civilization will show true evolution when we take use of true knowledge and think less about everything as "business". Business is an artifact. Truth and knowledge serve more faithfully.
Does anyone else here get the feeling from this that doctors have a sort of "well, that's how it's always been done" approach to medicine? I mean, you'd think that at some point, somebody would have stopped and said "is there a better way to do this?" I guess, in some ways, this guy is that "revolutionary" thinker...
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Am I missing something or does the article say nothing about what the new technique was? And why only the Da Vinchi drawings were the only ones that could have lead to this discovery.
Mitral valve prolapse, fortunately, is not deadly. But the usual treatment always has the potential danger of valve infection. I hope the new technique will help prevent that problem.
Do you really know how far he is / was?
Most of the time you don't really know until you get there.
You have got to be kidding me! This passes for news? Some doctor says 'whoaaaa mannnn, Da Vinci made some nice drawings' and then invents a new way to repair the heart, and the media links the two together. There is NO mention of what the new procedure consists of or why Da Vinci's drawings helped him invent it. I find it very hard to believe the Da Vinci really had some understanding of heart physiology that we don't and when the article makes no effort to convince me otherwise...well, color me skeptical.
/.
Go read http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/ backstories and learn why you should never listen to the mass media when it comes to scientific discoveries. I'm really surprised this got posted to
When Leonardo was alive, 500 years ago,there was no monopoly; barbers and other people with dubious trainng were involved in medicine.
Before Leonardo, in the early Middle Ages, say, when the Decameron was written (13++) physicians were not called "Doctors" because they did not have doctoral degrees. Only Theologians and Lawyers were Doctors. The best eaxample is Toma De Aquino, "Doctor Universalis" who had all the doctorates of the time, but was no physician.
From the article:
His anatomical knowledge came from his post-mortem dissection work, which the Church forbade.
Great minds of the past shouldn't just be honored for their great contributions to art and science. In fact, it may almost be more important that they defied the religiously dictated laws of their times. Even Isaac Newton, who may the most important scientist in our history, dabbled in occult beliefs that some feel led to his gravitational theory.
I tip my hat to Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, and others for having the guts to stand up to the religion to advance humans forward.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
Uh. What's that? Are you advocating that schools should stop teaching science altogether or that just public school should stop teaching science? If you think the problem is with the public schools, then the obvious strategy is to increase the funding so that they can do their job right. If you're saying that teaching science in schools should be dropped altogether, then I don't know what to say.
Not teaching science in schools is not an option.
The owls are not what they seem
A mechanic was removing a cylinder head from the motor of a Harley, when he spotted a world-famous heart surgeon in his shop. The heart surgeon was waiting for the service manager to come take a look at his bike. The mechanic shouted across the garage, "Hey Doc can I ask you a question?"
The famous surgeon, a bit surprised, walked over to the mechanic working on the motorcycle.
The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked, "So Doc, look at this engine. I also can open hearts, take valves out, fix'em, put in new parts and when I finish this will work just like a new one. So how come I get a pittance and you get the really big money, when you and I are doing basically the same work?"
The surgeon paused, smiled and leaned over, and whispered to the mechanic..... "Try doing it with the engine running!
... of malpractice suits. If you do something differently, and something goes wrong, the lawyers come out and sue because you were doing something non standard. I find it a bit spooky that a doctor would even need to look at old drawings to know how heart valves work. Isn't this why they are made to work on cadavers, so they know the body inside and out? Doesn't the real thing trump some old drawings?
Maybe not that far ahead. Good medical knowledge/practices seem to have gotten lost over the years, at least in "western" civilization. The Romans had decently trained medics/doctors with the ability to successfully treat lots of injuries and illnesses. I don't know about heart and brain surgery but they were good at eye surgery. So they missed the observation that discovered penicillin, but they knew it was a good idea to keep hospitals clean, they went with the option of buildings with lots of big open windows to provide plenty of ventalation to carry off the stuff that was coughed and sneezed out could be carried away by the wind instead of sealed buildings covered with bleach a few times a day. Today it seems a common solution for treating people is pump them full of drugs, broad spectrum antiboidics, pain killers and sedatives to the point where they can't think straight and see what happens. Then came the dark ages when everything good was lost of considered bad, the church considered it unholy to examine a body and taking a bath is bad because it removes the layers of protective dirt covering your skin. Advancement in western civilivation was halted or went backwards for a thousand years, The people of DaVinci's time only rediscovered the works of those a thousand years before. Yes, their building material were a little different, basic cement and iron and lead and oil lamps instead of steel reinforced hardened concrete and light bulbs and nuclear power plants but society behaved in much the same way.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
It may have come from a bit of a sensationalist reporter, Donal MacIntyre, but I have no reason to doubt his footage.
In India it is not unheard of that doctors will take organs from persons or bodies, such as valves in the case of bodies, for transplantation to 'customers' who need them.
The deceased may never have signed a donor form, and the family is not informed.
Neither is the recipient - they simply aren't told what type of valve they're getting (artificial being the common assumption).
To paraphrase a statement from one hospital CEO/doctor : "We open them up, take out the valves, sow them back up, and no harm is done. The body gets cremated and nobody will ever know."
So, yes... blow bureaucracy out of the way, and a lot of good can be done. But at what cost?
I think the article is improperly attributing Leonardo's role in the discovery. Leonardo made accurate anatomical drawings of the heart from which the heart surgeon took inspiration. In this sense, I see da Vinci as having provided artistic inspiration for this medical discovery, much as artists throughout the ages have provided inspiration for countless scientists. It is likely that the heart surgeon could have made his discovery based on any other accurate drawing or illustration of the human heart, but da Vinci's beautifully drawn anatomical sketches provided the inspiration. Admitedly da Vinci often blurred the line between art and science, but in this case it seems to me his role is that of an artist and inspiration, not of a scientist.
Uh. No they don't. Where you live, they have the right to take their kid out of the class and homeschool them. Over here, there is not even the homeschool option.
I pay taxes and my money is used on stuff that I don't approve of. Do I have a problem with it? Of course not. That's the way how a society works! Sharing and making compromises. "My tax money should not be used on stuff that I don't like" is nothing but self-centered Ayn Rand inspired whining.
The owls are not what they seem
Personally I believe that the problem is the increasing centralization of control over the schools. This includes all Federal interference and all state interference.
Schools should be funded locally, and have local control. Unfortunately, the various levels of government have stolen the sources which were traditionally used to fund schools, so local funding is a problem which needs solution. This doesn't make it any less necessary. If the local students are to be taught lies, it should be because the local citizens have decided that that's what they want their children taught. (They will suffer the appropriate consequences...but their folly should not be forced on everyone else.)
This has been my position for over 2 decades, and everything I've seen during that period of time has only reinforced the opinion. Only at the college or university level should the state (e.g., Idaho or Pennsylvannia) have any involvement. The states should run the colleges, because specialized education needs to draw from too large an area of population for local funding to be reasonable. They should be tuition free, but have appropriately difficult admissions requirements, and may limit the number of open spots for admission. (The state can decide how many English majors it needs to educate, and how many BioChemists, and fund that many classes of the appropriate type.)
At all levels, private schools should continue to be an option.
Some will argue that this will unfairly penalize the children of poor cities. In my experience in those cities the federal government alone extracts more funds nominally for education than are expended on schooling by all levels of government combined. This may not be true everywhere, but it's certainly largely true. Also, the most important parts of schooling don't require much in the way of funding, though they do require the cooperation of the parents. Thus if the parents will not cooperate with the local school, the school should have the right to refuse to allow the student to attend lessons. Disruptive students are not something that should be tolerated...but when schools are used in the way in which they are currently, that's what you get.
That said, not all students are academically inclined. There needs to be a flexible "tracking" system, which allows those mechanically inclined to develop their skills as well as a track which allows the academic students to develop THEIR skills. I envision one hour per day during elementary school (after third grade) where students experience are instructed in "enrichment specialties", which should include things like band, set theory (arithmetic should be mainstream...by rote, and sorry), wood/metal/plastic shop, etc.
OTOH, this requires a fairly large elementary school. Other benefits would accrue if elementary schools were local enough that all students could walk to them. That way the neighborhood kids would study together. This would probably mean that, e.g., grades K-3 would all be taught in the same room by the same teacher. (If you have enough students to split this in two, perhaps you could split them by distance rather than by age.) This WOULD be an acknowledged combination school and babysitting service, and play areas would be an important part of the situation. Teachers in this class would be expected to LIVE in the school, and keep it open. Provisions for substitutes would be necessary. Etc. Class sizes would be small, but the salaries would be enough to live on given the free rent. (I envision that most of these teachers would start out as mothers raising their kids. So room would need to be sufficient to handle not only the teacher, but also a husband or other partner and their children. With a safe fenced area around it which is the school yard.)
N.B.: A lot of what I'm proposing is just my idea spinning of how it might ideally work out. The important parts are:
1) No central control.
2) Local choice on funding & curricula & environment.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Part of medicine is research. You can be sure the first patients to receive a new technique have signed appropriate waivers.
You have the soul of an HMO administrator.
He sited Leonardo's drawings as being inspirational. Inspiration tends not to be entirely rational.
If the technique he has developed works, the answer in this case would be "no".
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I would mod everyone talking about evolution in school and tax dollars off topic. Serioulusly this article is about a new heart repair surgery inspired by Leonardo. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Evolution v. Intillegent design debate.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.