Medicine – Revolutionary Brain Surgery

Medical professionals all over the world are constantly looking for better ways to treat patients and diseases. In this program, doctors at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center treat a patient with a type of cancer that affects the area of the brain that controls function. Glioblastomas are aggressive and often fatal malignant brain tumors. To combat the disease, revolutionary medical treatments are beginning to save lives all over the world. Doctors found that when the procedure called an awake craniotomy was used, they are able to remove the tumor from the brain without damage to the language areas. During an awake craniotomy, surgeons can converse with the patient to hear if the language areas of the brain are being affected before removing the tumor, thus preserving very important parts of the brain as much as possible. In addition, the medical staff is able to create a vaccine from the extracted tumor. After the tumor is harvested during surgery, certain proteins from the cells are purified. These proteins are then concentrated and given back to the patient in simple injections. The purpose of this tumor vaccine is to spark the patient’s immune systems to fight the tumor and attack it to keep it from coming back. This issue also goes in depth about how the human brain works, the different regions, and specifically the Wernicke’s area, which is one of the two parts that is linked to speech.