Amputations without anesthesia in NKorea

Report: Amputations without anesthesia in NKorea - Yahoo! News


A 24-year-old defector from northeastern Hamkyong province told Amnesty that a doctor amputated his left leg from the calf down without anesthesia after his ankle was crushed by a moving train when he fell from one of the cars.

"Five medical assistants held my arms and legs down to keep me from moving. I was in so much pain that I screamed and eventually fainted from pain," said the man, identified only by his family name, Hwang. "I woke up one week later in a hospital bed."

 

I work in surgery and all I can say is, that if it's true, that's terrible! We do amputations and they are bloody, terrible things! Cutting through all that tissue and bone with no anesthesia would be nothing short of torture!

 

The people of North Korea do the best they can with what they got.

The government is nuts.
from wiki

By contrast, the US with 10 times the population has 1.4 million active service folks.

 

It's hard to believe anyone could survive such a thing.

 

They have Single Payer Health Care in North Korea. Berwick would approve.

 

OOH! That's gotta hurt.

 

Not really. Painful as hell, torturous, absolutely. But a quickly, done amputation wouldn't be that hard to survive even with no anesthesia. My question would be what other conditions it was done under and what the likelihood of infection is there. Barring a post-op infection he really should end up all right but damn I wouldn't wish that sort of Civil War era doctoring on my worst enemy!

 

So is this a 'we're so much better than those 3rd world sh*tholes' the point here?

high 5's all around?