The amount of compensatory sweating depends on the patient, the damage that the white rami communicans incurs, and the amount of cell body reorganization in the spinal cord after surgery.
Other potential complications include inadequate resection of the ganglia, gustatory sweating, pneumothorax, cardiac dysfunction, post-operative pain, and finally Horner’s syndrome secondary to resection of the stellate ganglion.
www.ubcmj.com/pdf/ubcmj_2_1_2010_24-29.pdf

After severing the cervical sympathetic trunk, the cells of the cervical sympathetic ganglion undergo transneuronic degeneration
After severing the sympathetic trunk, the cells of its origin undergo complete disintegration within a year.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0442.1967.tb00255.x/abstract

Thursday, August 13, 2009

medical sects and cults that propagate the Absurd

“...when irrational beliefs are shared with a surrounding community of sympathetic thinkers, errors become institutionalized. Thus are generated medical sects and cults that propagate the Absurd....
The guardians that usually keep the institution of medicine from reeling off into irrationality are social contracts built into medical science and ethical behavior. The academic community guards the contractual borders of science, while laws and regulations encode our ethical system. For the Absurd to have advanced, there must have been some breakdown of these social guardians.”
Propagation of the Absurd: demarcation of the Absurd revisited
Wallace Sampson, MD Editor and Clinical Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Kimball Atwood IV, MD, Anaesthesiologist; and Assistant Clinical Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine Medical Journal of Australia Dec. 2005