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Showing posts from January, 2008

Manto's Liver to Little Johnny: Thank You!

Manto wishes to thank the Johannesburg Transplant Unit for her new liver. She's sorry little Johnny didn't get the liver instead. And would like to make a toast to all those out there who supported her cause. Cheers! Glug.

The ethics of liver transplants for alcoholics...

Read an article on the front page of the Citizen , about Discovery Health (Bongi's favourite) refusing to fund a liver transplant on what seems like suspicion of alcohol abuse. So I want to debate transplants. And the ethical eligibility to receive one. Liver transplants spring to mind. Many conditions cause end-stage liver disease that would then require a liver transplant for survival. Livers are a scarce resource that do not become available everyday. For instance, in the UK, 17000 people are waiting for a liver transplant. If you're lucky, between 50 and 200 become available every year. So, how do you allocate organs appropriately and fairly? Do you want to give a liver to a person, who through large consumption of alcohol caused cirrhosis? Or do you want to give it to a child, who through no fault of their own, has biliary atresia. Or to a woman who developed auto immune hepatitis? Most international guidelines say that for a person who has alcohol-induced liver failure t...

Vitality. Is it vital?

Question. What does everyone out there (South Africans) think of Vitality? We've just joined. Got our super cheap gym, earning points like crazy. Blah. Blah. What do you think? Marketing gimmick? Or a real loyalty programme based on a healthly lifestyle?

Private Practice comes to South Africa

Shudder. This just CAN'T be good. Some background from IMDB . A highly regarded neo-natal surgeon and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, Addison is also a board certified OB-GYN with fellowships in maternal-fetal medicine and medical genetics. She also completed two years of study on cystic fibrosis. In addition, she is also one of only a handful of surgeons in the world who knows how to separate fetal blood vessels. She is increditably wealthy but it was never clearly implied if she was weathy to begin with or if she had to work for her success. Addison met her future husband, Derek Shepherd, in medical school and completed her residency under the supervision of her now good friend, Dr. Richard Webber, whom she, at one point, avoided for almost a year after he taught her a valuable lesson about not getting too close to her patients by putting her on a case in which the patient would inevitably die. Addie and Derek became extremely successful in their respective fields a...

Best Of All Scrubbed Up (Part 2)

Not enough bloggers take the time to go back in the archives and rehash some of their best material... Egotistically speaking of course. But we're different. WELCOME TO PART 2 - The Best of All Scrubbed Up - - - - - The World famous WHAT IS THAT?!? Competition Ah. Nothing draws crowds like a bit of guess-the-gross-thing-on-the-operating-table. This series of posts probably ranks as the most popular we've ever written for All Scrubbed Up. Read Part 1 of the competition here - or click here to browse through all the posts and their respective answers (reveals!). - - - - - HIV people CAN have children... And then a heart-warming piece about an experience SA Doc had with some HIV patients. We must never forget our empathy - especially being South Africans, living in the health environment we do. Aids is not a disease. It's a human rights issue. - Nelson Mandela, 2005. Read the post here . - - - - - And there ends the lesson. What do you think of the BEST OF selection? Let us ...