• Question: Do your surgeries save lives or improve lives?

    Asked by anon-175285 to Alex, Ella on 13 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Ella Mercer

      Ella Mercer answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      So in my job I don’t actually do surgeries. I try to understand what goes wrong in the brain in a disease called Multiple Sclerosis. When we understand what goes wrong hopefully we can find a treatment/cure to fix it! That will both improve and hopefully save lives!

    • Photo: Alex Alamri

      Alex Alamri answered on 18 Jun 2018:

      Hey there, it’s a mixture of both.

      In neurosurgery there are lots and lots of different operations we can do.

      In my hospital we get a lot of trauma like car accidents and things like that. Those operations are all life saving.

      In other places in London they do brain stimulation for diseases like Parkinson’s disease. It means that somebody who couldn’t walk or move properly before can get their symptoms really improved and have a much better life. It doesn’t work for everyone though.

      We also operate on the spinal cord when people can’t walk properly or have really severe pain. If we can take that pain away then people’s lives can really improve.

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