Word: patients
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Anesthetics are riskier than most people realize. One of the dangers is from cerebral anoxia-damage to the brain because of lack of oxygen in the blood, which may kill, paralyze or even turn the patient into a mental defective. Thus far, surgeons have had to rely on such none-too-certain tactics as watching the patient's color, respiration and pulse, or using slow chemical tests...
...device is primarily a photoelectric eye which is attached to the rim of the patient's ear; it reacts to the color of the blood in the ear: bright red when there is enough oxygen, darker as the oxygen diminishes. A year ago Charles F. ("Boss Ket") Kettering,* former head of the General Motors Research Laboratories, joined the team to iron out some technical bugs...
Trained Metastases. Dr. Marinelli and his associates worked out a neat method of dealing with this difficulty. First they removed the patient's normal thyroid and with it the original cancer. This left the metastases which, they found, often consisted of cancer cells that retained faint remnants of the normal function of the thyroid. With the normal thyroid gone, the degenerate cells awoke and began to act like thyroids. Stimulated by the proper drugs, they began taking up iodine and making it into thyroid hormones. Then Dr. Marinelli gave radioactive iodine to the patient. The tumors, acting as pinchhitting...
...each individual case, the doctors have to make a grim decision. Should they prolong a life that is sure to be "unsatisfactory?" Should they, by prolonging life, place a crushing burden on the patient's family? Should they, in desperate cases when everything else has been tried, use a drug so dangerous that it may kill the patient immediately? Such questions have no single answer. The doctors decide each case separately, considering such matters as the painfulness of the treatment and the patient's chance for happiness during his possible remission...
Treatments were given a week apart at first, then at longer intervals depending on the patient's response; average number given was less than three. All patients left the hospital without sign of rheumatic heart disease except mechanical damage that had already taken place in the heart; 20 have returned to normal activity; one died, from another disease, and one "gained immeasurably." The three doctors concluded that "UBI" (ultraviolet blood irradiation) is safe and may prove, after further tests, to be the best treatment available...