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Woman's Voice Restored After Larynx Transplant
mvar writes "A woman in the US is able to speak for the first time in 11 years after a pioneering voicebox transplant. Brenda Jensen said the operation, which took place in California, was a miracle which had restored her life. Thirteen days after the surgery she said her first words: 'Good morning, I want to go home.' It is the first time a larynx and windpipe have been transplanted at the same time (image) and only the second time a larynx has ever been transplanted. In October, surgeons at the University of California Davis Medical Center removed the larynx, thyroid gland and 6cm of the trachea from a donor body. In an 18-hour operation, this was transplanted into Ms. Jensen's throat and the team connected it to her blood supply and nerves. Thirteen days later, she was able to speak her first croaky words and is now able to talk easily for long periods of time."
The happiest 11 years of one man's life.
That'll be difficult. I hear he dies hard.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
So is "cracker" or "whitey" or "nerd" or "douche" and yet nobody gets their dick all bent out of shape for those things. Maybe these trannies just need to grow a pair of balls.
I work in (real) medicine, I'm a fervent believer in it, and I use the phrase "Big Pharma", not to degrade the medical practices, but rather the business decisions.
My favorite example is the drug Zofran, it is the gold standard in chemo anti-nausea meds (with some arguments to be made for pot, but I'll not get into that.). We're talking the chemo patients who haven't been able to keep any food down for a week, and nothing else worked, unless they had particularly good insurance, Zofran was the last option, and it almost always worked...the reason it was the last choice is that it was sold for a bit over a thousand dollars a dose.
When it came off patent, and the generic manufacturers got started on it, would you care to guess how much they were selling it for?
Go ahead, guess.
Nope, you're wrong, about a dollar fifty a dose.
Now, I can have some sympathy for the argument that they need to recover the R&D costs, but due to what amounts to legal maneuvering, they managed to extend their patent for basically 15 years from FDA Approval to it coming off-patent...Did they really need 15 years of about a 70,000% markup?
That's my favorite example, but it's far from the only one.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.