You're All Fighting for Second
We don't do a lot of book reviews (none, actually) here at the Bureau of Indications, but a book came across the desk that we just have to mention. The 20th-anniversary edition of “Kill as Few Patients as Possible—and Fifty-Six Other Essays on How to Be the World's Best Doctor,” written by Dr. Oscar London (a pseudonym), contains such gems as “Don't be the last Doc on the block to own a plastic gallbladder” and “Call in death as a consultant.” Kind of warms your heart, doesn't it? As the self-proclaimed “World's Best Doctor,” Dr. London felt it was his duty to provide other physicians with the means to become the “world's second-best doctor.” He goes about it in a decidedly non-politically correct manner that may be best exemplified by his dieting advice. High-fiber health food, he says, causes intestinal gas, and “I'd rather be carted out at 60 than farted out at 90.”
Organ Donors
Well, spring is here, and organs are busting out all over. The last couple of months have seen several advances in NOTES, or natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery. ("Orifice” is one of those words that just sounds funny, don't you think? Say it quietly to yourself: orifice. You chuckled a little, didn't you?) A team of surgeons from the Hospital Clinic de Barcelona was the first in Europe to remove a kidney through a patient's vagina. Only days before, surgeons at the University of California, San Diego, were the first in the United States to remove a patient's appendix through her vagina. A couple of weeks earlier, UC San Diego had claimed the first oral appendix removal in the United States. The appendix patient, Jeff Scholz, a 42-year-old Californian, was happy to report that his pain was “a 2 on a scale of 1–10” a day after the surgery. When his mother heard about the surgery, she remarked, “I'm not surprised. You wouldn't believe some of the things that have come out of his mouth.”
Police Pursue Penis Purloiners
The latest report from the Democratic Republic of Congo suggests that surgeons may not be the only ones removing body parts these days. In Kinshasa, police recently arrested 13 sorcerers for allegedly using witchcraft to steal or shrink other men's penises. The arrests come after rumors of penis theft spread through the city, dominating radio call-in shows and leading to a number of attempted lynchings of people believed to be sorcerers. The victims, 14 of whom were also arrested, said that the sorcerers just touched them and made their penises either disappear or shrink. Kinshasa police chief Jean-Dieudonne Oleko said to Reuters, “I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it?'”
New Botox Revenue Stream?
This month's Botox-related news comes to us from Italy, where investigators injected a laboratory preparation of botulinum toxin A into a bunch of appearance-conscious rats to track its “long-distance retrograde effects.” Within 3 days of being injected into rodents' whisker muscles, evidence of the toxin was detected in the brainstem, as reported in the Journal of Neuroscience. When the botulinum was injected in the hippocampus in one hemisphere, it migrated to the hippocampus in the opposite hemisphere. When it was injected into the superior colliculus, a visual center, it moved to the rats' eyes. These findings conflict with earlier studies showing that botulinum is broken down at the injection site and does not move through nerves. Maybe, though, the brain is not such a bad place for Botox to be. After all, brains are full of wrinkles.
Anything for Charity
The organs may be busting out, but it's not really spring here in the Washington area until the American Liver Foundation's local chapter holds its annual “Flavors of Northern Virginia” event. This year, guests enjoyed a five-course meal, complete with wine pairings, prepared by chefs from 11 local restaurants, including Fleming's Prime Steak House & Wine Bar and Ruth's Chris Steak House. Okay, let's see if we've got this right: People paid $100 a person to fight liver disease by eating a calorie-laden, wine-accompanied meal that is the type of thing that causes fatty liver disease? What else would you expect from an organization that refers to itself as ALF in a press release? In that same vein, though—raising money by doing the thing you're trying to prevent—why not fight the spread of sexually transmitted diseases by having an orgy? Or the Sierra Club could auction off logging rights at Yellowstone. The possibilities are endless.