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After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

bbc.com

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Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

#21

Post by logicchains »

schrodinger wrote: post #18
toolz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mistakes in medicine are one of the leading causes of death in america. It's not an unwarranted fear.

Huh? Are mistakes in medicine responsible for cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases, or cancer? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_causes_of_death

http://www.forbes.com/sites/leahbinder/2013/09/23/stunning-n...

"With these latest revelations, medical errors now claim the spot as the third leading cause of death in the United States, dwarfing auto accidents, diabetes and everything else besides Cancer and heart disease."

Based on the findings of http://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/0...

Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

#22

Post by logicchains »

Tyr42 wrote: post #17
bitJericho wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah all medical interventions have can have side effects; they should be considered.

But they should be considered proportionally to their probability times severity, and in this case, the probability is small enough to be a rounding error, so you really should worry about other things first, like getting killed when driving to the dentist's.

According to [1], medical errors are actually the third leading cause of death in the United States, so it's hardly a small probability.

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/leahbinder/2013/09/23/stunning-n...

Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

#23

Post by RexRollman »

Foy wrote: post #2

>he wakes up every morning believing he is still in Germany in 2005, waiting to visit the dentist. Without a record of new experiences, the passing of time means nothing to him. Today, he only knows that there is a problem because he and his wife have written detailed notes on his smartphone, in a file labelled “First thing – read this”. Literally 50 First Dates...

His daily reaction to the appearence of his aging wife, and his own aging appearence, must be interesting.

Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

#24

Post by rayalez »

noblethrasher wrote: post #9

In a talk that I attended, Steve Wozniak mentioned that he studied a lot of psychology when he returned to the university after leaving Apple. He thinks that he may have been the first person to have come up with idea that we lose our memories with our teeth, and that researchers later discovered a link between the loss of our early autobiographical memories and the loss of our baby teeth.

He says in his autobiography that he was in a plane crash. That was the reason for leaving apple. He suffered from memory loss, so probably that is the reason for his interest in psychology.

From wiki:

"Wozniak sustained severe face and head injuries, including losing a tooth, and also suffered for five weeks after the crash from anterograde amnesia, the inability to create new memories. He had no memory of the crash, and did not remember his name in the hospital or the things he did after he was released from the hospital."

Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

#25

Post by randomdestructn »

schrodinger wrote: post #18
toolz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mistakes in medicine are one of the leading causes of death in america. It's not an unwarranted fear.

Huh? Are mistakes in medicine responsible for cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases, or cancer? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_causes_of_death

Clicking through your link gets some stats that agree with them [1], based on this paper [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventable_causes_of_death#Ac...

2. http://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/0...

Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

#26

Post by kzvezdarov »

joezydeco wrote: post #15
csomar wrote: post #11

The doctors initially suspected that he’d reacted badly to the anaesthetic, causing a brain haemorrhage – yet they failed to find evidence of injury. So he was discharged with the mystery still hanging over him, and the family moved back to England, where he was referred to the office of Gerald Burgess, a clinical psychologist in Leicester. Scouring the medical literature, he found five similar cases of mysterious me…

Earlier this year I had a medical procedure and was given "twilight" anesthesia. I was explicitly told "you need to have your spouse or a friend here because we're going to give you instructions afterward and you probably won't remember it". And, sure enough, my memory was pretty much wiped for the hour or so after the event. Later that evening I had a conversation with my wife that went like this: "Um, did you help…

That's interesting and supports the idea that it might be related to genetic factors. I've had two twilight anesthesia procedures done about two months apart and remember the events before and after waking up in a lot of detail. I've also had regular general anesthesia once in my life, with the same result. As a bonus, I seem to resist local anesthetics to a degree that requires 2-3 times the amount a normal person does (and even then, the pain finds a way through).

Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

#27

Post by tim333 »

csomar wrote: post #11

The doctors initially suspected that he’d reacted badly to the anaesthetic, causing a brain haemorrhage – yet they failed to find evidence of injury. So he was discharged with the mystery still hanging over him, and the family moved back to England, where he was referred to the office of Gerald Burgess, a clinical psychologist in Leicester. Scouring the medical literature, he found five similar cases of mysterious me…

Yeah, I've got a friend who had a brain haemorrhage with similar memory effects. It wouldn't surprise me if that had happened on a small scale and they just failed to detect the damage. I presume they use a brain scan and it can only pick up certain types / sizes of damage.

Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

#28

Post by MichaelCrawford »

rayalez wrote: post #24
noblethrasher wrote: post #9

In a talk that I attended, Steve Wozniak mentioned that he studied a lot of psychology when he returned to the university after leaving Apple. He thinks that he may have been the first person to have come up with idea that we lose our memories with our teeth, and that researchers later discovered a link between the loss of our early autobiographical memories and the loss of our baby teeth.

He says in his autobiography that he was in a plane crash. That was the reason for leaving apple. He suffered from memory loss, so probably that is the reason for his interest in psychology. From wiki: "Wozniak sustained severe face and head injuries, including losing a tooth, and also suffered for five weeks after the crash from anterograde amnesia, the inability to create new memories. He had no memory of the crash…

Was that in Scotts Valley? Ive flown over that strip (as a passenger). the neighbors forced it to close, the strip is still there but there are big red Xs painted all over it. I expect its intended for use in emergencies.

I understand he didnt set the trim, which adjusts the balance of the plane for the distribution of passenger weight.

Re: After simple dental surgery, William lost his ability to form new memories

#29

Post by rev_bird »

RexRollman wrote: post #23
Foy wrote: post #2

>he wakes up every morning believing he is still in Germany in 2005, waiting to visit the dentist. Without a record of new experiences, the passing of time means nothing to him. Today, he only knows that there is a problem because he and his wife have written detailed notes on his smartphone, in a file labelled “First thing – read this”. Literally 50 First Dates...

His daily reaction to the appearence of his aging wife, and his own aging appearence, must be interesting.

That's the part about this I'm so hung up on -- that this poor guy not only has this crippling condition, but that he has to come to terms with it every hour and a half, forever.
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