Another story (ongoing) from the risks-versus-benefits department, with no easy answers. But probably in the end the patients with the severe disfigurements should decide what they are willing to risk.
In the next few weeks, five men and seven women will secretly visit the Cleveland Clinic to interview for the chance to have a radical operation that’s never been tried anywhere in the world.
It is a medical frontier being explored by a doctor who wants the public to understand what she is trying to do.
It is this: to give people horribly disfigured by burns, accidents or other tragedies a chance at a new life. Today’s best treatments still leave many of them with freakish, scar-tissue masks that don’t look or move like natural skin.
These people already have lost the sense of identity that is linked to the face; the transplant is merely “taking a skin envelope” and slipping their identity inside, Siemionow contends.
Her supporters note her experience, careful planning, the team of experts assembled to help her, and the practice she has done on animals and dozens of cadavers to perfect the technique.
But her critics say the operation is way too risky for something that is not a matter of life or death, as organ transplants are. They paint the frighteningly surreal image of a worst-case scenario: a transplanted face being rejected and sloughing away, leaving the patient worse off than before.
It took more than a year to win approval from the 13-member Institutional Review Board, the clinic’s gatekeeper of research. Siemionow assembled surgeons, psychiatrists, social workers, therapists, nurses and patient advocates, and worked with LifeBanc, the organ procurement agency she expects will help obtain a face.
At first, not everyone was on her side, acknowledged the board’s vice chairman, Dr. Alan Lichtin. After months of debate, Siemionow brought in photographs of potential patients.
Looking at the contorted images, Lichtin said he was struck by “the failure of the present state of the art to help these people.” He decided he didn’t want to deprive the surgeon or patients of the chance.
The board’s decision didn’t have to be unanimous.
In the end, it was.
Read the entire article. [here]
I’m willing to bet these ppl’s disfigurements are pretty horrible (like never leave your house EVER) that they’d be willing to perhaps risk their life to change the way they look.
I don’t think it’s as if the doctors will just give up if the first patients face transplant is rejected. They will keep working until they find a solution.
Knowing a man that is very disfigured from a fire while teenager, I can understand the need. I only hope that the science is good enough to help the candidates live better lives without further, related medical problems.
I wish the surgical team and the candidates all the best.
I just can’t wait for them to refine the procedure on the poor and disfigured and then see Michael Jackson use it.
It’s the next step for Joan Rivers
I’d say it redefines being two-faced….
And everybody (including me) thought that Travolta/Cage movie Face-Off was so far-fetched…!!!!!!!!!!!!! Holey canoley!
lol, what really love to know is if Donald Trump is using real gold to colour his hair?
The justification for this surgery is very questionable, in my opinion. First of all, the woman will have to take drugs to suppress her immune system for the rest of her life, which will probably be shorter because of these drugs.
Secondly, I read that she already accepted money for a movie deal. AND her doctors supposedly accepted some money for the movie deal, too.