Face transplants promised hope. Patients were put through the unthinkable

I SO hate this style of reporting. They make me read through 10 paragraphs of human interest pap, when what I really want is to learn something about the medicine that the headline promises. Then a couple of paragraphs of concrete info, then dive back into another vignette. I didn't click into the article to read shocking sad stories, I came to learn something, and the writer is making it unnecessarily difficult to do so.

It's so jarring getting a peek into the mind of someone who sees the world this way. Take this, for example:

>Globally, there are perhaps 20 (mostly male) specialized surgeons capable of face transplants

What an extraordinarily petty way to announce your bitter, cynical world view.

Or announcing your racial allegiance with the capitalisation of "Black" vs lower case "whiteness", or indeed the assertion that made it necessary to bring race into this at all: that White people are to blame (as per usual) for low organ donorship among African Americans.

It must be exhausting.

But....the human stories are the whole point of this, no? I just finished the article and it shows clearly(to me) that there are patients who suffer horrible consequences of having those transplants and the system just mostly.....doesn't care? Like one of them says - he can't afford a $100 uber to the hospital, so the hospital just writes him down as non-compliant. So in the medical stats behind this he's probably recorded as healthy and happy, since he doesn't even turn up to his appointments anymore! As one of the surgeons is quoted later "most patients are happy and don't complain" - that's the entire point of this article, maybe they don't complain because they can't or they feel like they can't. If they are being wheeled around to be shown publicly as the pinacle of human surgery they feel like they can't go and say "actually this isn't working for me".

Again, it just sounds like the fault of the system, mostly the American non existent healtcare system. When my dad was treated for cancer using an experimental treatment at a leading oncological hospital in warsaw, he had all his travel costs covered by the hospital. But it sounds like in US insurance companies are just not interested in actually helping these people, I guess it's cheaper to let them die from complications?

>>when what I really want is to learn something about the medicine

I think you can learn - the fact that for some procedures the interest in outcomes ends with patient survival and not with long term prognosis. I imagine it's not universal, but the article describes specific cases of specific people. They are essential to the story.

In 1967 Louis Washkansky lived 18 days after receiving the world's first heart transplant. Today Bert Janssen has lived 41 years with a transplanted heart.

Progress is hard won, and the first people to undergo new procedures are the ones who have it hardest.

The article seems heavy on blame but it seems the people involved are just trying to do the best they can for patients who are in an extremely grave situation where good outcomes are unlikely.

You're a) projecting, b) astroturfing, c) both, d) both (unconsciously)

This capitalization been AP style for years now.

https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...

I think this is an "everything sucks here" kind of story.

We don't understand the immune system enough to make transplants less risky.

We don't seem to know if QoL is better between those who take the procedure vs those who don't.

The ongoing costs to supporting these operations are crazy and the dysfunctional US system doesn't help.

Oof

Recently I've seen some articles that they've figured out at least partly how the immune system learns to ignore antigens. And have made progress with inverse vaccines.

Cross fingers perhaps that'll make transplants work without having to bludgeon peoples immune system to keep them from rejecting.