isabelle dinoire - Face Transplants-"God is in the details"

March 5th, 2008 · No Comments

isabelle dinoire -
For transplants, ‘God in details’
Swerving ethical pitfalls, Czech doctor to conduct controversial face surgery

By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague PostFebruary 20th, 2008 issue

Pomahac will be one of the first to perform a face transplant.
Stages of a transplant
Locating potential patients will not be easy for Pomahac, since he requires them to already be on immunosuppressant drugs
Face donors will only come from families who say “take anything” from their deceased; “regular” donors will not be touched
Once a match is made between donor and patient, the face must be harvested and transplanted within four hours
Recovering patients should be able to leave the hospital after a week, but will require regular physical and psychological therapy

Isabelle Dinoire is thrilled with her new face.It has been more than two years since Dinoire became the recipient of the world’s first partial face transplant in France, after her original mouth and nose were gnawed off by a pet dog concerned by her overdose on sleeping pills. She can now feel the graze of a filament across her cheek and her drooling is under control.Dinoire’s replaced face is well on its way to being a success story, but it did not come without sacrifice or controversy. Twice her body came close to rejecting the foreign skin, which could have led to the face sloughing off. To prevent such rejection, she must take debilitating drugs for the rest of her life. Since Dinoire’s surgery, only two similar transplants have taken place, one in China and the other also in France. Many surgeons are deterred by the logistical and ethical layers enfolding the operation, leaving the field open to a select group of trailblazing doctors who are looking to push the limits of medicine. One of those surgeons is Bohdan Pomahac, a Czech national working at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Pomahac, who directs the hospital’s burn unit, is setting up a surgical unit to conduct face transplants, and he could soon become the first to lead the surgery in the United States. “The bottom line is that the risk [of face transplants] isn’t as significant as surgeons thought,” Pomahac says. More than any kind of surgery, facial reconstruction fascinates Pomahac, a point that became clear in a series of phone interviews. “God is in the details” in face work, he says. “You can really change someone’s life.”

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