Cast after cast after cast in the first thirty minutes today, apparently children get hurt often on the playground, who ever would've guessed? Anyways, that's besides the point. Today was a shorter day for patient visits, but I was able to read some interesting things in the book, Scoliosis: Ascending The Curve, about how scoliosis surgery was about fifty years ago.
First of all, I read that instrumentation wasn't even used, it didn't go in depth on how this surgery would've worked without instrumentation, but this is all for my own pleasure in trying to understand how lucky other recent patients and I have been with the evolution of treatment that has happened over this time period with shortened hospital stays, better/more available instrumentation, and not having the large preoperative examination that used to be standard.
In this examination, patients had to stand in a swimsuit in front of 20 or so doctors for them to look at the patient and see them visually before taken back for surgery.
They also had to go through a series of full body casts for six weeks, to prepare her for the traction she would have to go through for those six weeks before the surgery. People used to call it the "torture chamber" according to this book.
Because there instrumentation was new and rarely used, when it wasn't used, the spine was straightened by force and a bone graft.
We've come a long way from there and now make it easier on patients to recover, with most of them able to walk the day after surgery rather than the two months after that most people used to have to do because of full body casts.
Wow! I feel really lucky to have been born in an era of advanced medicine... To think that what you described was only 50 years ago! So I'm curious: Do any of the complications present in those "olden days" remain today, or are the ones of today new side-effects that have arisen entirely as a result of current improved techniques and procedures?
ReplyDeleteI haven't been able to find anything on older complications, but I'm going to assume that there are similarities in things such as the curve coming back afterwards, but I'm not sure. This is a good question that I'll look into more!
DeleteHey Kayla! It is really interesting to see how far medicine has come! I was wondering, you mentioned that when instrumentation was not used, the spine was straightened using force and a bone graft. How would you do a bone graft? Also, what kinds of other complications did this procedure result in?
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