My wife and I spent Christmas week in London. We planned ahead and saw quite a bit. I highly recommend visiting Churchill’s war rooms in which he and his staff managed Great Britain’s WWII activities. I did have one disappointment: the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons was Read More
Tag: thoracic surgery
Second Opinions Patients are frequently advised, or decide on their own, to seek a second opinion after a recommendation to undergo an operation. That seems reasonable but it can actually result in more uncertainty than existed prior to the second opinion. When the surgeon agrees with the first recommendation the Read More
This guest blog was written by Mark K. Ferguson, MD. Mark and I were colleagues at the University of Chicago where Adams and Phemister performed the first transthoracic esophagectomy with reconstruction. He has led the Thoracic Surgery division for many years and is an accomplished esophageal surgeon. ~ The average Read More
Pus in the chest. Any fluid accumulation in the chest but outside the lung, between the two pleural surfaces, constitutes a pleural effusion. My previous blog addressed malignant ones. An infected effusion is called empyema. The most frequent cause is pneumonia. Uninfected effusions frequently accompany pneumonia but occasionally they are Read More
Cancer and fluid in the chest. When a surgeon looks into a chest the initial view reveals only a lung. It seems to take all the room. That’s because it’s full of air. However, while it touches the inside of the chest wall it’s not attached. The lung is quite Read More
Fad or the future? In my last blog I touted the benefits of minimally invasive chest surgery, thoracoscopy, which provides as good outcomes as open surgery but causes much less pain and allows patients to recover quicker. So-called robotic surgery is felt by some surgeons to be the next advance Read More
Less is more…beneficial. For years surgeons had only one option for an operation to provide access to internal organs: open surgery performed through a usually generous incision through skin and muscle. In a chest operation the access procedure to get inside a chest is called a thoracotomy. It begins with Read More
Sweat. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Don’t sweat it. Bad advice if taken literally. Sweat plays an important role in preventing hyperthermia, when the body overheats. Hyperthermia can be fatal as internal organs over heat and eventually fail. The beads of salty water we call sweat evaporate Read More
