Health Benifits

A hand-held, manually-operated, instrument that has various forms of fine ridged cutting surfaces along part of or all of its working end that is used for cutting and smoothing (filing) bone tissue. It is made of high-grade steel and may be a one-piece instrument with a handle at the proximal end. The distal end may be flat or profiled (e.g., flat on one side and convex on the other). This device is typically used in orthopaedics, plastic surgery and dentistry. This is a reusable device.

A strongly constructed, hand-held, surgical instrument designed to separate a bone into two parts through a cutting action. It typically consists of an instrument having one or two sharp robust blades that close over the bone and cut it.

It is available in various designs: 1) a pliers-like design with elongated blades, or 2) twin angled blades attached to strong, sprung (self-opening), pivoted or multi-pivoted handles; that, when squeezed together, close the blades so that they cut entirely through the bone. Also known as bone shears, it is mainly used in orthopaedic surgical procedures and oral surgery. This is a reusable device.

A hand-held manual surgical instrument designed to grip and hold a bone or, being used in pairs one on either side of the fracture, to approximate the proximal and distal segment of a fractured bone during orthopaedic surgery. It is typically made of high-grade stainless steel and is designed with a double hooked, blade-like jaw at the distal end (this hooks over the upper edge of the bone) whilst an adjustable single hook is tightened against the lower edge of the bone through a screw mechanism.

A traction bar may be employed to bridge the two bone clamps and using its screw mechanism, the fracture is drawn together. This is a reusable device.

Using a prospective, randomized, blinded, controlled multi-center study. Ott et al., (1998) assessed the efficacy and safety of the Insuflow (Georgia BioMedical, Inc.) filter heater hydrator device in reducing the incidence, severity and extent of hypothermia, length of recovery room stay and postoperative pain at the time of laparoscopy. Patients underwent gynecologic procedures via laparoscopy and surgeons, anesthesiologists and recovery room personnel assessed the results; incidence, severity and extent of hypothermia, postoperative pain perception and length of recovery room stay.
The Insuflow group had significantly less intraoperative hypothermia, reduced length of recovery room stay and reduced postoperative pain. Pre-conditioning of laparoscopic gas by filtering heating and hydrating was well tolerated with no adverse effects. The safety profile of the Insuflow pre-conditioned gas showed significant benefits compared to currently used raw gas.
The authors concluded that pre-conditioning laparoscopic gas by filtering heating and hydrating with the Insuflow device was significantly more effective than the currently used standard raw gas and was safe in reducing or eliminating laparoscopic-induced hypothermia, shortening recovery room length of stay and reducing postoperative pain.
(1)

Farley et al., (2004) reported that while patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy with warmed, humidified CO2 had several advantages such as;
maintain a warmer intraoperative core temperature, have their surgeon experience less fogging of the camera lens, and have less postoperative pain than patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy with standard CO2 insufflation that were statistically significant, no major clinically relevant differences were evident.
(2)

All multicellular organisms may be affected or have the potential to be afflicted by cancer. Paleopathologists have observed cancerous lesions which occurred even in dinosaur bones long before the apparition of Homo sapiens. The ancient Egyptians observed the cancer in humans, and in the Edwin Smith papyrus, a glyph clearly refers clearly to a clinical cancer of the breast. Moreover, the autopsies of mummies have proven the existence of bone tumors and confirmed the probability of other cancerous processes.

By the era of Hippocrates in the 4 th century B.C., breast cancer was clinically recognized and described and Hippocrates considered that in many cases it was very important that one of his cardinal rules, Primum non nocere (first do no harm) be applied, since little could be done for the patient. Hippocrates establishes the use of the term carcinoma when referring to tumors “that spread and destroyed the patient “and advances a theory according to which cancer is determined by the excess of “black bile”. Hippocrates (and after him many other doctors in the following 2000 years) tended not to treat the deep-seated or ulcerated cancers, because “if treated, the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for a long time.”

About six hundred years later, Galen makes another classification describing “tumors according to nature” (the normal enlargement of the breast with female maturation or during pregnancy and “tumors contrary to nature” (benign and malign tumors). Galen also was the one who suggested the slight similarity between a crab and cancer.

During the Middle Ages the medical practice has been dominated by the concepts of Galen and Hippocrate. The Renaissance and the 17th and the 18th century brought a new perspective on the disease. The “black bile” theory of the cause of cancer has been disputed by an increasing number of physicians (one of the most important being Ramazzini) and the surgery of neoplasms appeared. There were written treatises on mastectomies for breast cancer some of them mentioning the dissection of regional lymph nodes. Ramazzini also attributed the high prevalence of breast cancer among nuns to their celibate life. This observation withstood the test of time.

In the nineteenth century the medical community and the scientists began to study cancer systematically and intensively. The anatomist Bichat is the one who extended the principles of Galen. Bichat (1821) described the anatomy of many neoplasms and is the one who suggested that cancer was an “accidental formation” of tissue built up in the same way as any other portion of the organism. Seventeen years later, Johannes Müller extended these observations through the use of the microscope. Although the cellular theory was just being formulated and little was known about the cell at that time, Müller demonstrated independently that the cancer tissue was made up of cells. Rudolf Virchow (1863), a student of Muller extended our descriptive knowledge of cancer; he came up with a number of theories that were later disproved but he was the first one who pointed out a relation between chronic irritation and some cancers.

As major advances have been made in biology, many advances have been also made in the study of cancer. In 1829, Recamier introduced the term “metastases” in his work Recherces du Cancer and described clearly how cancer spreads by metastasis. Another important advance in cancer study was the demonstration by Waldeyer (1872) that the metastases were the result of the fact that some cells from primary cancers infiltrated lymphatic vessels.Other important advances in oncology were based on the work of Novinsky (1877), Doven and Shimkin (1970) .