Long-form writing on the science, history, and clinical context of metabolic medicine. Pieces here go deeper than announcements — they are the company thinking out loud about the field we are working in.
On the morning of June 12, 1979, in the pediatric operating room of University Hospitals of Cleveland, a four-and-one-half-month-old infant was the first human being to receive a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy. The procedure took less than fifteen minutes.
Among the devices in routine use at every hospital bedside, the nasoenteric feeding tube is among the oldest in concept and the least altered in form. Well over a million such tubes are placed in the United States every year — and by repeated measurement, it is the most painful procedure routinely performed in the emergency department.
On September 12, 1985, a surgeon in Böblingen removed a gallbladder through a scope he had partly built himself — and was nearly run out of the profession for it. Within a decade it was the standard of care. In medicine, the unit of real progress is rarely the instrument or the molecule. It is the route.