A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery
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A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery
A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery(face transplant)
Posted on 09/18/2005 2:53:35 PM PDT by neverdem
CLEVELAND: Five US men and seven women will secretly visit a medical clinic in Ohio in coming weeks to vie for the chance to have a radical operation that has never been tried anywhere in the world.
They will smile, raise their eyebrows, close their eyes and open their mouths. The Cleveland Clinic's Maria Siemionow will study their cheekbones, lips and noses. She will ask what they hope to gain, and what they most fear. Then she will ask: "Are you afraid you will look like another person?"
Because whoever she chooses will endure the ultimate identity crisis. Dr Siemionow wants to attempt a face transplant.
She is exploring the medical frontier in the hope of giving people disfigured by burns, accidents or other tragedies a chance at a new life. Today's treatments still leave many with scar-tissue masks that do not look or move like natural skin.
These people have already lost the sense of identity that is linked to the face. The transplant is "taking a skin envelope" and slipping their identity inside, Dr Siemionow says.
Her supporters note her experience, planning, the team of experts assembled to help her, and the practice she has done on animals and human cadavers to perfect the technique.
But her critics say the operation is too risky for something that is not a matter of life or death, as organ transplants are. They paint a surreal image of a worst-case scenario: a transplanted face being rejected and sloughing away, leaving the patient worse off than before.
Such qualms recently scuttled face transplant plans in France and Britain.
Ultimately, it comes to this: a hospital, doctor and patient willing to try it.
The first two are now in place. The third is expected shortly.
The "consent form" says the surgery is so new and its risks so unknown that doctors do not think informed consent is possible. Here is what the form tells potential patients:
Your face will be removed and replaced with one donated from a cadaver, matched for tissue type, age, sex and skin colour. Surgery should last eight to 10 hours, and the hospital stay will be 10 to 14 days.
Complications could include infections that turn your new face black and require a second transplant or reconstruction with skin grafts. Drugs to prevent rejection will be needed for life, and they carry the risk of kidney damage and cancer.
After the transplant you might feel remorse, disappointment, grief or guilt toward the donor. The clinic will try to shield your identity, but the media is likely to discover it.
The clinic will cover costs for the first patient; nothing about any others has been decided.
These candidates need to be able to face rejection.
Thus making losing face more than a metaphor!
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Skin grafts are done fairly frequently from cadavers. Usually not this extensive.
Further, since it is a very thin skin layer that is transplanted the likelhood of waking up looking like someone else is pretty thin (pun intended). The transplant will match your bone/muscle structure over a few weeks.
And this is a good thing, because otherwise Hillary would be wearing Al Gore's face next week.
A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery
Here's posted threads.
A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery
A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery(face transplant)
Nothing new here, been done before, Hillary Clinton is really Joe Stalin.
Michael Jackson?
That's disrespecting the dead!
Uh, ok, but my theory is Joe's not dead.
Why aren't these people being evaluated for mental deformities?
They force transexuals to undergo years of psychiatric treatment, and I think this is just as drastic.
Wonder how the cadaver's living family will feel when they see their dead loved ones face on a different body?
I guess leaving myself to science is now out of the question.
"Complications could include infections that turn your new face black and require a second transplant or reconstruction with skin grafts. "
My theory is that these failures have really been going on in secret for years. How else does one explain Helen Thomas, Joey Biden or Susan Estrich?
I accept your thanks for not posting photographs of the above. I didn't do it out of kindness...I simply don't know how to do it!
I was going to leave my body to art.
Guess that's out of the question now, too. Don't want someone going around with this bod I worked so hard for! ;-)
didnt cage and travolta already do this?
I think it was Eleanor Rigby.
Would be nice for those so severly disfigured they would go to this extreme to have it actually work.
I loved the prison scene where Cage is getting beat up and he looks over at his younger brother, and for a split second has this confused look on his face. Then he displays a menacing "f--k yeah" grin and starts kicking butt.
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