Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Althouse

Legal Commentary

: Althouse

Brain surgery done with a common hardware store power drill.

By Ann Althouse

The surgeon is British, but he is operating in Ukraine:

[Henry] Marsh?s life-saving exploits in Ukraine began 15 years ago when he visited a state hospital in the former Soviet republic to give a series of lectures....

Patients with benign tumours, which would have been diagnosed early and quickly dealt with in Britain, were only treated once they had caused blindness or were bulging grotesquely off the sides of patients? heads.

In Ukraine so little money is invested in the state health system that Marsh has to drill through the skulls of patients under local anaesthetic because no one is sufficiently trained to fully sedate them.

Marsh said he had watched aghast as patients died while doctors were locked in bureaucratic meetings. ?I couldn?t bear to stand by and do nothing,? said Marsh, 58. ?A Ukrainian doctor told me I couldn?t do anything to help but I wasn?t prepared to accept that.?

Marsh has worked with a Ukrainian neurosurgeon, Igor Petrovich, to improve "the atrocious conditions in a climate where no one criticised the state," and now is saying that in some ways the UK is worse:

"Igor is now doing a huge amount of operating, far more than me, while I, as with all senior doctors on the NHS, am struggling under a tsunami of regulation and bureaucracy."

Full post as published by Althouse on March 17, 2008 (boomark / email).