[HN Gopher] One man saved a generation of premature babies (2016)
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One man saved a generation of premature babies (2016)
Author : osener
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-12-29 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| btilly wrote:
| This has been posted several times over the years.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701556 seems to be the
| only previous discussion with comments though.
| weinzierl wrote:
| The invention of incubators and the idea to supply premature
| babies' underdeveloped lungs with oxygen is hard to
| underestimate.
|
| Unfortunately for a short time after invention some doctors
| thought that more helps more and exposed the babies to very high
| oxygen concentrations without knowing that this hinders the
| development of the retina and leads to blindness. Probably the
| most well-known victim of this unfortunate phase is Steveland
| Morris aka _Stevie Wonder_.
| lhamil64 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's what caused my blindness. My dad has
| even told me that he remembers thinking at the time that 100%
| oxygen wasn't a good idea. I'm kind of lucky though that only
| one retina fully detached. They were able to save one eye, so I
| have some vision at least.
| taxicabjesus wrote:
| The tragedy of #OxygenToxicity is that the antidote was
| known, and was becoming normal medicine, but got forgotten
| around 1950/1960.
|
| The tragedy of 2020 is how the doctors tried to help their
| patients with toxic amounts of oxygen. I referred to that
| episode as the tragedy of #MedicalHyperventilation.
|
| I'm optimistic that regeneration will be the next
| breakthrough in medicine.
| lynx23 wrote:
| The effect of blindness though incubators was so pronounced
| that these days, assistive technology companies put a
| significant amount of revenue decrease towards this having been
| fixed. IOW, the incubator misuse created a whole generation of
| blind people and a whole industry around them.
| User23 wrote:
| As an aside Stevie Wonder is active in the NFB and at CSUN.
| I've never had the opportunity to meet him, but he greatly
| contributes to the blind community.
| spidersouris wrote:
| Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. On the same topic of
| vision, a recent study argues that preemies are also more
| susceptible to astigmatism and myopia, whether they have
| retinopathy or not[0].
|
| As a preemie myself (born 28 weeks), I have a feeling that even
| though there has been much work on the immediate effects of
| prematurity, the long-term consequences of being born
| prematurely have, on the contrary, been severely understudied.
| And let's not even mention the causes themselves -- even though
| some effects or behaviours from the mother may increase the
| chances of giving birth prematurely (smoking, stress), nothing
| seems to be absolutely set in stone, at least as far as I know.
|
| [0] https://tp.amegroups.org/article/view/39381/30467
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_A._Couney
| nashashmi wrote:
| Imagine charging people to see medical procedures in hospitals.
| We can call it the hospital circus.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Interestingly, the end of public medical procedures is fairly
| recent in US history. There's a Seinfeld episode that revolves
| around a public procedure. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697715/
| cfu28 wrote:
| I mean, it's called a operating theater for a reason
| aaomidi wrote:
| The show the artful dodger showcases this quite a bit.
|
| Heck it's how the surgeons got paid.
| smulloni wrote:
| The best treatment of this historical topic in print is Dawn
| Raffel's The Strange Case of Dr. Couney:
| https://www.dawnraffel.com/drcouney
|
| Dr. Couney also features in Raffel's fictional Boundless as the
| Sky: https://www.dawnraffel.com/boundlessasthesky
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