Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/07/delhi-painter-receives-rare-double-hand-transplant.html
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The title really undersells the story. This guy didn’t just get a hand transplant, he got full forearm and elbow. That Drs were able to attach nerves from his residual limbs to the muscles in the new forearms and make it work is downright astounding!
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This is incredible indeed! I guess it’s a good thing that we clarified that it was a willing donor?
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that part needed a little fleshing out, if you’d excuse the pun. she was listed as an organ donor, and she was deceased. the article made it seem like the donor was like, “oh, you need arms? take mine!” just weird phrasing. but an incredible story about what doctors can do these days.
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This is great, but I definitely would have requested to have extra long arms if possible. Could be especially useful to painters.
If you’re happy and you know it…
I’ll see myself out…
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This is just genuinely brilliant.
I get annoyed at tech companies trying to push high-tech prosthetics that rely on power and electronics, and that are too complex for the user to repair.
But at the same time, while non-powered prosthetics have come along incredibly over the past 50 years, I’m still well aware of the every-day pain they put their users through due to impact and friction.
Replacement limbs have, in my eyes, always been the ideal we should strive for, and I can only hope that this becomes a common procedure.
Now if we could just crack replacements grown from the patient’s DNA, that would be perfection.
FYI: My Dad lost his leg in a motorcycle accident when he was 19, ten years before I was born, and I’ve always been very aware of the challenges he has faced as an incredibly active man.
Arms are very different from legs with all sorts of other associate challenges, and even if they had cracked leg transplants, such surgery is probably out of the question for Dad (he’s a spritely 79 now), but this gives me hope for future amputees.
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I wonder if this might actually be a simpler procedure than trying to attach a new hand at the wrist since most of the muscles that move the fingers are in the forearms anyway.
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If you still have active nerve connections to the forearms, seems like hooking up the muscles to the tendons in the hands would be easier - I thought connecting the nerves has always been the trickiest bit. I’m amazed there’s enough of a nerve connection that he can move anything in this case.
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“Willing donor”?
I’m guessing someone who passed away and donated their body for such purposes.
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What, are you thinking this is the plot of a sequel to the 1991 movie Body Parts? (All I know about it is what I learned from the trailers back in the day. Apparently the recipient of an arm transplant is pursued by the arm’s original owner, who was a convicted killer thought to be dead. Someone receiving two donor arms would be the natural setup for a sequel, I figure.)
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I figured it was an organ donor, but “willing donor” is such a weird way to word it. Like, they were willing to die to donate their arms?
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Yeah, I can see that, but I think they just mean a regular old body donor.
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