Hannover and Vienna

So this is our last week of the program and the over all feeling is that I don’t want it to end. Of course I am looking forward to being back in CS and being able to completely relax for a day but if I had the chance to stay I definitely would. Thinking back to the first week, I remember feeling like it was going by slow, but now here I am with only one real day left and now it seems like its gone by all too fast. Its strange to imagine that in no time at all I’ll be sitting on a night train on my way to Frankfurt. Its not something I’m really excited for but it will be nice to finally be on my way and not worrying about making sure I’ve got all my connections right. Spending these last few days in Vienna could very well be the best part of the trip from a purely tourist’s perspective. It’s old and beautiful. It has the feeling of those middle age European cities like Prague, but its still is very modern and simple to navigate. Michael and I talked about it and we decided that Vienna is our favorite city we’ve seen.

But before I got to Vienna, we had a few days stay in Hannover. On that first day there the group got to visit the Hannover Medical School. It wasn’t exactly what Wasser had planed, but I still got a lot of great information out of it. In our time there we meet with the head of the Nephrology department, Dr. Kielstein I believe, or maybe it was his colleague I’m not too sure, who spoke with us about Germany’s health care system and what its like being a doctor there. His talk was very interesting, and I was appreciative to the fact that he kept the discussion very open. We went over some of the better points of socialized medicine as well as the problems and questions that occur under this system. Not one German doesn’t have health insurance, which is pretty amazing. That means a homeless man can walk off the street and receive the medical treatment he needs. Many people in America find this to not be such a great thing because that homeless person is just using the tax dollars of the rest of society without contributing. While I understand why you could be upset about this, I don’t feel that it creates enough of a problem to not include them. What problems I do have is the fact that a person can receive treatments that aren’t truly necessary but still be covered or that I could be paying for medical procedures that I don’t agree with morally. Something that I found refreshing and surprising was when Dr. Kielstein said that more doctors in the US do charity works than in European nations. This is partly do to the fact that doctors in the US get paid more, but he said its also because of the different perceptions doctors have in the states, they seem to be more geared towards the idea of helping people rather than just preventing illness.

That same day we also toured the cattle clinic there in Hannover. It was incredible how different the operating conditions are between cattle and humans. Our guide through the clinic told us that their facilities were top of the line in regards of sanitary conditions, but since I had just seen the OR at the hospital in Bonn, the difference was astounding. For instance the rooms were noticeably dirty, and the operating tables were rusty. This makes it sound like the clinic is doing a bad job, but the reality is these cattle have much better immune defenses than humans so the chance of infection is very low.

On Tuesday we took the train to Bad Oeynhausen where the Hear and Diabetes Center is. There we had the pleasure of seeing open heart surgery. In the operation I observed the doctors were doing a standard bypass. I would have to say the most interesting part of the surgery was when the doctors stopped the heart by squirting a potassium solution onto the heart. I couldn’t help thinking that this same solution is given to death row inmates. But after the potassium stuff had done its job the only reason the patient was still alive was due to the incredible cardiopulmonary machine. This machine along with the LVADs we saw was fascinating to see in person. The coolest and strangest thing I saw at the hospital was the two patients who had LVADs, and the one other who had a total artificial heart. Walking into that room and hearing the mechanical pumping noise was very eerie, I know these devices are there to save lives but seeing these men hooked up to them and hearing their stories it became obvious that in some cases the life saving devices can be much like a ball and chain for a prisoner. The one patient who had the total artificial heart was soon going to have to go from this rather small and mobile device to a much, much larger machine they call big green. This is box is a much older technology and it would sentence him to be confined to a hospital bed for the remainder of his wait to receive a donor heart. The company making the heart he has at the time is going to stop production on his model, and because of this the government wont pay to let him use it. It was an enlightening thing to see, I can now be more aware of these types of situations when I go into the device industry and do my best to not forget about the patients.

1/14/11