Finnish Patient’s New Jaw Grown With Stem Cells
You know, that’s the thing about socialized medicine. There’s no motivation for innovation. There’s no research or development. It all comes from The United States of America. Except, apparently, growing new bones for a patient using stem cells harvested from the patient’s own adipose tissue.
super cool! This seems almost too good to be true. I look forward to the the publishing of the actual paper. I wonder about future jaw cancers in the patient though. Sadly I just posted about how we were years away from actually being able to use stem cells. I think they did it just to make me look bad. ;)
Socialized medicine allows for much more seamless care, medical records and data extraction crucial to good research. Scandinavian doctors are constantly publishing amazing studies that no one else can do.
So I could lose some of my fat and grow some new beta cells at the same time? Where do I sign up?
A lot of the R&D in socialized countries (esp for pharmaceuticals) is made with the intention of selling to the American market where you can actually make money on your product.
Research done on starvation in the communist countries this past century is second-to-none, I’ll give them that.
Thanks for that factless speculation, Kelly. I’d love to see something to back up your claim. Pharma makes a profit in country they sell–but it’s much less of a net profit than it is here in the US.
Fact is, we’re certainly not growing jaw bones from stem cells here and transplanting them back into patients. They’re doing that in Finland.
Okay, we should all be socialist because Finland came up with a stem-cell procedure that supposedly worked on a single human. That makes sense.
We’re doing it on hearts here (and in Germany et al). Yawn. We’ve been doing BMTs in the US since the 1950s. Plus there are all the intra-uterine stem cell operations…
I’m holding out for a stem islet cell transplant to cure my little affliction. Cure my problem if you can—don’t really care where the doctors were born.
Socialism causes increased taxes which causes increased poverty, unemployment and increased wait times, especially for elective procedures such as this stem cell transplant. In Scandanavia, you call an ambulance and they’ll tell you you’re too old and you need to find the hospital yourself. You need an elective neurosurgical procedure and your wait time is 5 years to see the neurosurgeon AND your taxes are 60% of income. I’ve been to Scandanavia. It’s not as swell as you think; however, they are lucky in that they barred most non-European immigration until about the 1970s, so they have a fairly homogeneous population of basically a bunch of white Minnesotans, a factoid that cannot be underestimated when comparing groups.
Ouch. I’m a pasty Scandinavian. We’re nice people, even if we do need a little Vitamin D. Just for the record, Finns are closer to Magyars than Vikings. . . but, moving on.
I don’t see operations like this getting paid for in a single-payor system. What’s a patient gonna do? Get their employer to switch healthcare finance administrators? Get an individual policy with someone who will cover new jaws? Without the risk of losing customers for denying procedures like this, there’s no incentive to provide them other than basic human decency, which, sadly, is not something you can count on from a monopolistic bureaucracy.
Going back to the Scandinavian thing; I don’t see Scandinavian ER waiting rooms filled with people looking for primary care replacement services at 0300. Nobody’s trying to scam free liquid Tylenol for their seventh demon spawn. Palliative and hospice care are readily available and it’s rare that terminal cancer patients spend the last weeks of their lives in an ICU. I’d think someone who rails against these kind of wastes would take a little more benevolent view of their system.
E
I live in Poland – one of the scary east european countries, our goverment tries to make our health system sth between the American and the Scandinavian..I don’t know if it’s going to work but one thing is certain – now everyone (or almost everyone of course there are some exeptions as always) who needs emergency help gets it. This means that lots of money is spent on alcoholics and etc.(I used to work in an ambulance for my vacation training and there were many such patients) but on the other hand they are people too…
The other thing is money the medical personnel earns here but that’s a different issue and I can’t think of a suitable comment ;)
Good luck with the boards…I’m in kind of a simmilar situation because I have to take neurology exam on tuesday:)
M.
A little deviation from the politics.
Why go through an expensive process to reconstruct a jaw? You can do fantastic reconstruction with the fibular (ENT, plastics) and if necessary, have orthodontics help out. This can be accomplished shortly after resection of a tumor and it is important to preserve feeding and reduce morbidity in the long run. Of course, there is the aesthetic benefit. It is not perfect, but it is damn near perfection in the hands of a skilled surgeon.
I applaud the drive behind research but I can think of a million other ways to use stem cells vs growing a jaw. So, what will the patient do while waiting for the jaw to grow? I am anxious to see the long term results.
And…how many patients would carry a jaw in the abdomen for 9 months. Most of these patients have already been through a lot (whether it’s trauma or cancer) and just want to move on. Impressive but may not be practical for the masses.
maybe i’ll start growing my own new jaw… you know, just in case.
as a matter of fact, i’ll make sure it’s more chiseled and distinctive than the one i currently have. :)
I must admit I find Nurse K’s ramblings quite amusing. IN SOVIET SCANDINAVIA DOCTORS PAY YOU!
Jokes aside, Scandinavia is not on the brink of collapse due to our welfare system, quite the opposite. Denmark currently has the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, 1.3% lower than the US unemployment rate. The nation has never been wealthier than it is right now, the Danish people is once again surveyed to be the happiest in the world, and Denmark was lauded for the second year in a row by The Economist as the best country in the world to do business.
As for waiting lists, we do have waiting lists for non-acute operations in some hospitals, though by law never more than four weeks from first contact with the GP to finished operation. Cancers are considered fairly acute; the most dangerous types have a 48-hour waiting list, the slowly-spreading types at most two weeks.
As for our high taxes, I would point out that only 8% of pre-tax income goes to healthcare, as opposed to the millions of Americans paying over 10% or even 25% on top of their insurance![http://www.grahamazon.com/2007/12/insured-americans-be-afraid] The rest of my taxes go to pay for other public services and are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Fact is that the USA spends 16% of it GDP on health care, more than twice as much as most European nations with universal health care, and yet the American life expectancy and infant mortality rates do not reflect this at all; a child actually has a better chance of survival in Cuba or Korea than it does in the USA.
~Cecilie.