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Using Sound Waves For Outpatient Neurosurgery
eldavojohn writes "Got a piece of malfunctioning brain tissue in your head? Want to avoid messy lobotomies and skull saws? Well, you're in luck; a study shows that acoustic waves can do the trick and will hopefully treat patients with disorders like Parkinson's disease. A specialist said, 'The groundbreaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain — through the intact skull and skin — with extreme precision and accuracy and safety.' They focus beams on the part of the brain needing treatment and it absorbs the energy, which turns to heat. The temperature hits about 130 F, and they can burn 10 cubic millimeters at a time. Using an MRI to see areas of heat, they can watch the whole time and target only what needs to be burned. The study consisted of nine subjects suffering from chronic pain that did not subside with medication (normally they need to go in and destroy a small part of the thalamus on these patients). After the outpatient procedure, all nine reported immediate pain relief and none experienced neurological problems or other side effects after surgery."
Unless, of course, you have the regions overlap.
You'd think that an outpatient procedure like this would be considerably cheaper than the traditional alternative. For a while the technology will be expensive, but the cost will come down, whereas the cost of human labor (i.e., of surgeons and nurses) will not. So in the long run, perhaps this is cheaper.
You are logically correct. However, you would never get real people to go along with such a system because people quickly go illogical when their own lives, or the lives of loved ones are on the line. We are much more likely to have a healthcare system paid for by a preset percentage of the economy, the size of which will be quite large.
--why?
Actually I find the fact that we just go in there and destroy a relatively large part of the brain as the leading edge technology kind of amazing. The fact that it seems to work is even more amazing. But essentially this is a hammer, made to work on the opposite side of the wall. You still go in there and destroy whatever is there. Just weird to me that this is the cutting edge so far in brain surgery is all. Just goes to show how far we still have to go.
Sorry but this comment is just a whole bunch of fail -- first of all, neither you nor I know how this process works. First off, you are complaining about the deficiencies of something we have never been able to do before? You do realize that the alternative is cutting open your skull and digging around in your brain, right? And then it never states in the article that the size is fixed at 10mm3 (although it very well might be) and even if it is, I am fairly certain that they would have figured out a way around this deficiency, like, you know, overlapping treatment regions or something?
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There's probably quite a bit of the body that has no pain receptors. You don't really need pain receptors on a lymph node, for example, so I would imagine there would be rather fewer of them.
I don't see why this couldn't be used elsewhere in the body, and I imagine as the technique improves, people will find all kinds of uses for it beyond killing cells. (For example, being able to selectively warm internal tissue might be quite valuable when treating hypothermia.)
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I think this would mean that you would have to carefully plan your meals -- times, portions, specific foods -- for the rest of your life. Or die of starvation and never even be aware of it.
It would work, sure, but it really strikes me as a case of the cure being worse than the disease. And if you are capable of putting that kind of care into your diet, you can probably lose weight without burning out a part of your brain.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Try taking ethics. If we followed your slippery slope logic we'd start killing people when they hit retirement age. After all, they'll never again go back to work and 'pay back' their value after they start collecting social security. Same for the mentally retarded, just drown them right?
"Realistically we need to start realizing that not every person DESERVES the best treatment". And who decides that?
New procedures are always expensive, do you think the first x-ray machines were worth the cost to say "yup, you got a broken leg son". Now they are standard practice.
"so costly that society can never regain that investment". Public education is costly, if a kid isn't learning and behaving by second grade should society perform a retroactive abortion? After all without an education they'll just be a burden on society, and its not worth paying for the education if they aren't being productive, why not save the money for the other years of school?
Did you have a 4.0 GPA in school? what about college? How much are you contributing to society now? I'm not so sure I am getting back my investment in you. Most of the education system in the world are funded by tax dollars.
What about no child left behind? Why don't we get real efficient and just let them starve? They'll never pay enough in taxes to 'regain investment'.
Neurosurgery (along with other kinds of brain damage) frightens me like few other phenomena. It's a little bit like saying: "okay, this piece of code in the kernel is crashing. Let's overwrite it with NOPs and see what happens." What if you need that part of your brain? Are you really the same person after the procedure?