Medicine: Walking During Surgery

If a patient could be kept walking around during major surgery, instead of lying still, he would have a better chance of surviving. Reason: the commonest cause of death after operations is pulmonary embolism—blockage in an artery leading from the heart to the lungs, by a blood clot formed elsewhere in the body. One of the commonest places for such a life-threatening clot to form: the legs, because the blood “pools” there during inactivity. Two Canadian surgeons now suggest an ingenious way of keeping the patient’s leg muscles and veins working about as energetically as though he were walking around, even when he is under deep anesthesia.

At Westminster and Victoria Hospitals in London, Ont., two brothers, Drs. John and Angus McLachlin, decided that the thing to do was to make the calf muscles pump the blood at full rate. To do this, they report in the Archives of Surgery, they attached stimulating electrodes (similar to the paste-on recording leads used in taking electrocardiograms) to the calves of patients undergoing long operations. A simple electrical pacemaker kept the muscles contracting and the blood flowing, clot-free. The Canadians believe that the method might save a lot of lives if enough surgeons try it.