The day the first protohuman bandaged another’s abrasion, medicine began the slow crawl towards robotic surgery, artificial organs, and all that lies beyond. However, that crawl has become a sprint. Progress has been breathtaking in the last century alone.

Bloodletting didn’t disappear with the dark ages like it should have. A few quacks were still practicing it in 1926. But now, 100 years later, we manufacture synthetic blood (HBOC’s) for patients who have been “bled” by injury.

In 1926, some rural “healers” were still trepanning to release evil spirits from the patient’s head. Now we use sophisticated robotic assistance to remove brain tumors through keyholes in the skull.

One hundred years ago, radium was thought to be a miracle cure. It was added to beauty creams, even food and drinks, causing much cancer along the way. But now that we understand alpha radiation and its deleterious effects, we use radium to selectively treat cancer rather than cause it.

Individual humans seem to learn faster than humanity as a whole, i.e., those who had holes drilled in their heads did not suddenly find themselves cured of mental problems, and those diagnosed with cancer ceased to brag of their radium-induced health. But the whole process raises questions, doesn’t it? Will “modern” methods of brain surgery and cancer treatment be derided by future generations of practitioners?

For example, all cerebrovascular surgeons are aware of the intricate fluidscape within the brain, in fact their career revolves around skillful manipulation of it. The network of vessels—and the blood they contain—functions as an incredibly complex interaction of pressures, volumes and velocities, always effecting and influencing one another within the brain’s vasculature. As a result, flow measurement is tantamount to success in any cerebrovascular surgery, because any change in one vessel’s flow necessarily alters the flow inside the vessels around it. This all sounds good and well, but will it hold into the future?

The best indicator of future performance is past performance. Flow measurements have been standard in operating rooms for more than three decades. On the other hand, no one ever saw a demon leave someone’s skull after trepanning, and radium offered no evidence of improved health. It simply offered flash, pizzaz, and social glitz of the “newest” discovery. Humans again leaped to a conclusion without good reason.

So as long as our conclusions don’t outrun our evidence, it seems we’ll remain on the right path. Like cerebrovascular flow measurement.

A century of change is too much to refute or ignore. So is thirty years of consistent evidence.

So, in the finest clinical sense—excelsior!

Thanks for reading,

             Transonic Systems, Inc

                               The Measure of Better Results