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[...] After all, who needs a hole in the head? Yet for thousands of years, trepanation -- the act of scraping, cutting, or drilling an opening into the cranium -- was practiced around the world, primarily to treat head trauma, but possibly to quell headaches, seizures and mental illnesses, or even to expel perceived demons.
[...] "In Incan times, the mortality rate was between 17 and 25 percent, and during the Civil War, it was between 46 and 56 percent. That's a big difference. The question is how did the ancient Peruvian surgeons have outcomes that far surpassed those of surgeons during the American Civil War?"
[...] Whatever their methods, ancient Peruvians had plenty of practice. More than 800 prehistoric skulls with evidence of trepanation -- at least one but as many as seven telltale holes -- have been found in the coastal regions and the Andean highlands of Peru, the earliest dating back to about 400 B.C. That's more than the combined total number of prehistoric trepanned skulls found in the rest of the world.
Source: Remarkable skill of ancient Peru's cranial surgeons
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 10 2018, @08:30PM (16 children)
That's an easy one, Civil War surgeons had less practice, less skill, and less effective resources at their disposal than Incan trepaniers. Metal instruments aren't by themselves a predictor of improved outcomes - just as doctors today, with all the best equipment and training, can and do still screw up for any number of reasons.
I suspect the ancient Peruvian's primary advantage was time allotted to perform the procedure: not rushed on a battlefield or pressured to maximize throughput/profit in an office can be a huge advantage for patient outcome. Also, it takes a really long time to make good stone surgical tools.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 10 2018, @08:32PM (7 children)
You can reread the post before hitting submit, and still miss a word in the subject.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @08:56PM (6 children)
Maybe SN should allow editing (by original author) of subject lines?
Iirc, we've already discussed why allowing the editing of posts is (on balance) not a good idea.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10 2018, @09:40PM (5 children)
They could allow editing of a post for a few minutes or until someone replies. That would prevent edits that were the byproduct of a response.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 10 2018, @09:48PM (4 children)
I don't see what harm could come from allowing editing of a post for 2 minutes, or until the first response or mod point is applied?
Other than the bugs this would introduce in the code base....
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(Score: 3, Informative) by lentilla on Monday June 11 2018, @04:36AM (2 children)
No - the rules as they stand are simple, easily understood and consistent. It's like speaking in a public forum - once we have spoken, the words are out. There is always an opportunity to later issue a correction or retraction.
When I reply to a post I am replying on the basis of what I have seen written. I would be most unamused to find that my reply (some minutes later) was invalidated by an edit between the time I hit "reply" and the time I hit "submit". (What are we going to do - lock posts whilst ever there is a reply pending? For how long?) No matter the strategy applied (per above: allow editing for two minutes, until first response or mod point), allowing posters to edit their submission opens the door to a whole lot of grief. (And bugs :-)
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 11 2018, @10:45AM (1 child)
Why would you need to lock posts or do anything so cumbersome? As long as the system tracks which posts have been edited, it should be relatively simple when you hit "submit" for the system to throw up a flag: "The post you are replying to has been edited since you hit 'reply.' Do you still want to submit your comment as written, or do you wish to edit?"
(Yes, if you spent time crafting a long detailed reply, this could be annoying, but how long can your reply be in the two-minute window suggested by GP? Personally, I think if we'd bother with such a feature, editable time should perhaps be five minutes to actually be useful. But whatever.)
Even better (or in addition): the system always maintains a history of all versions of a posted comment which can be accessed via expansion or link or whatever, so no version is ever lost. In the rare occurrence of rapid-fire exchanges here, and someone makes an edit, you can always point out your comment replied to a previous version (or, in fact, the system could actually note that by default).
As opposed to the current system where we have to put up with posts clarifying stupid things like spelling errors or missed words just to correct or clarify a minor error?
No system is perfect. On the other hand, I have no major problems with the current system and agree with your last point that additional complexity has the potential for more bugs.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 11 2018, @11:08AM
If you're responding to something specific, it's always a good idea to:
it anyway. If we want to go hyper-correct on the whole thing, an edit history could be kept and made available complete with a reason for edit field.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @12:51PM
Soylentnews can't even get paging right. If you move back to previous, dated pages you'll see they contain posts from neighboring days. How about they fix the tiny things before they try something major like changing how posting works.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Sunday June 10 2018, @10:41PM
To the contrary, a skilled knapper with the proper material available can fabricate top-notch stone tools quite quickly, much more quickly than you can realistically produce the metal equivalents. (Yes, today we may pop them out of a machine, but the process that started with mining the ore still takes years to complete.)
That's not the weakness of stone tools, it's more like one of their strengths. The weaknesses include being more fragile, more prone to damage, dulling more quickly, and therefore require more frequent maintenance and replacement. Often stone tools were resharpened repeatedly, growing a little smaller each time, and a piece that started as a large blade might end life as a tiny scraper chip after many resharpenings.
Anyway, it's possible that the Peruvians were measurably 'better' in a real way here, but it's also possible this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. As you say, the later doctors were operating under battlefield conditions, and we really don't know the case with the Peruvians. It seems reasonable to suppose that some were, but maybe many were not. Might have been done primarily to young people in perfect health and ideal conditions, which would certainly help with the survival rate if true.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday June 10 2018, @10:42PM (2 children)
IIRC Europeans brought diseases for which the indigenous Americans had no defense. Could it be possible that there were fewer germs around, fewer infections, better healing, etc.?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:29PM (1 child)
No.
There were just as many unfamiliar germs and diseases in the new world as there were Europe, or the far east. Its just that the locals were pretty much well prepared to fight those diseases off. Sad to say, there was no Garden of Eden. Someone lied to you.
Contrary to popular belief locals did not all die of European imported diseases. While its true that Spanish conquistadors led by Hernando Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, respectively, resulted in large part from epidemics of smallpox and measles virus infection that decimated the native defenders, this decimation took a decade to materialize. Indigenous populations did not drop like flies from disease while on the battle field.
Their own religion was used against them. They believe Cortes was Quetzalcoatl (a god) and for the most part were easily recruited against their leaders.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:46PM
I mostly agree that there were plenty of germs around the Americas pre-Columbus, and Peruvians, Incas et.al. had their own cities with clusters of humans to breed human specific germs, but... I don't think that the American cities were as dense or well connected as the cess-pool commerce centers of Europe at the time. In other words, I'm hypothesizing that it wasn't so much luck that the Europeans won the disease war, but more that they had trained for it for centuries and came out on top by virtue of having lived in greater squalor for many previous generations.
The Americas, and the tropics in particular, are full of all kinds of nasty diseases, even today, but the really brutal wipe out your whole village stuff like small-pox, plague, etc. seem to have been a European specialty.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:55PM (2 children)
I suspect that the main difference was the theory of "laudable pus". Surgeons used to be proud of not washing their hands between patients. Probably that exact preference wasn't followed on a battlefield, but it inspired a lot of associated customs.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday June 11 2018, @12:47AM (1 child)
Even worse, not washing their hands after performing an autopsy.
It's also interesting the resistance those surgeons showed against the germ theory of disease.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 11 2018, @02:00AM
There are still physicians (and even surgeons) who are resistant to hand washing guidelines. The surgeons are in a minority, but in clinical practice it's reversed. Every single credible study ever published finds positive results for caregivers washing their hands between patients, but when you're in a busy practice, that's a lot of handwashing, and it can be rough on your skin if you do it to the guidelines.
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(Score: 4, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Monday June 11 2018, @12:02AM
Believe me, there's nothing monotonic about Dr. Ben Carson, our greatest brain surgeon!!!!