So, a very young boy just had the first-ever double hand transplant in Philadelphia. It was like a team of 40 surgeons in a 10+ hour procedure! And, a doctor told the press how careful they had to be to assure not to mess up key “receptors” (my word, for lack of the exact medical term(s)) that allow the hands to grow with the child.
Now, how in the world do these doctors practice such procedures that come around so rarely? And, I don’t just mean the orchestration of a 40-person team. I mean, landing the hand’s critical receptors in the right places without messing it up? Think of all the things that can go wrong here! So, how do they practice manipulating not just the instruments but manipulating all the delicate strands of flesh, nerves, and muscles from the donated hands!?!
Perhaps, it is no different than the menu of specialized surgeries they do every day…whether sewing closed a hole (i.e., a patent) in a newborn’s heart or what have you? Or, do they frequently have to go back to practice in an operating / teaching classroom to work on cadavers? (And, if so…how many hours to get the “muscle memory” and the “feel” of the right tension for the sutures, etc.? Seems like an impossible feat! What’s the SD on this?
By doing tons of other surgeries. There are several celebrity doctors whose daily focus is on nips and tucks, but whose charity work involves all kinds of surgery. The anesthesiologists in that transplant team are anesthesiologists day in, day out; the nurses are surgical nurses; the surgeons themselves may have included several surgical specialities: trauma, neuro, pediatrics…
Cadaver work is restricted to medical school and forensics, it’s not part of a surgeon’s normal routine.
That’s what I was going to say… the neonatologist that my wife saw with our second kid was telling us about his experiments doing some kind of prenatal heart surgery, and how he was practicing on goats (or was it sheep?).
So his day job was basically as a neonatologist, seeing high risk pregnant women and delivering their babies, and on the side (more or less), he works on prenatal surgeries and other experimetntal stuff.
Right. I’ve designed surgical instruments and observed experimental surgery.
Doctors that would propose a hand transplant are likely instructors in a teaching hospital and would have determined which procedures are critical steps in the process and would perform these. They probably did practice these on cadavers and animals, both of which are routinely available at a medical school. Then they would call in the best people they knew in orthopedics, anesthesia, and even donor organ preservation. Even a “routine” heart surgery can involve 8-12 medical staff.
And because this is the first “double” hand transplant doesn’t mean there haven’t already been many “single” transplants they had experience with. I doubt there’s much difference in the technique, but perhaps they have to make special plans to maintain the patient under anesthetic for a much greater period of timel and perhaps even for the surgical staff to ward off the fatigue of a long stint in the operating room.