Face transplants can work, studies show | Reuters — A wacky story that has a lot of elements of a good Sci-fi tale or the loose ends of a crappy TV series.
New faces given to a Chinese man after a bear tore off part of his face and a French-Caribbean man disfigured by a rare tumor show that such transplants can work and are not medical oddities, researchers said on Thursday.
The findings give hope to some people with severe facial disfigurement and suggest the transplants could prove long-lasting without major problems, two separate research teams reported in the Lancet medical journal.
Despite recurrent episodes of tissue rejection in the first year after their transplants, neither man had psychological problems accepting their new faces and have been able to rejoin society, they reported.
Its a major skin graph…
so whats the problem?
It’s just a facelift on steroids. I heard Nancy Pelosi has already signed up!
I don’t see anything “wacky” about this at all. It seems like a fantastic breakthrough for people who had lost all hope of a normal life.
The reason it’s tricky, despite the fact that there’s over 40 muscles in the region, is that our face is us. It’s our personna…
I’d say it’s one layer of “us”. I read something about the original case in France and learned that the contours of our face come largely from the underlying bone and muscle. Following these transplants the patients look surprisingly recognizable.
It sounds like New Face from Logan’s Run.
#1 From what I’ve seen ( an extensive documentary about the French-Caribean man, on French TV), it’s much deeper than a skin graph: that man’s face had to be completely reshaped ( replaced ?), it looked like an enormous tumor ( remember elephant man..). The face needed to be reconnected to the mouth ( jaw? I’m no doctor..), the skull,…