Dr. Greenfield is Human
A few days ago I read that Dr. Lazar Greenfield, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, resigned as the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons over flak for authoring a Valentine’s Day-pegged, tacky, tasteless and sexist piece in Surgery News. The February issue is mysteriously absent in the pdf-ied archives. According to the Times coverage: “The editorial cited research that found that female college students who had had unprotected sex were less depressed than those whose partners used condoms.
From Pauline Chen, also in the Times:
It begins with a reference to the mating behaviors of fruit flies, then goes on to discuss studies on the menstrual cycles of heterosexual and lesbian women who live together. Citing the research of evolutionary psychologists at the State University of New York, it describes how female college students who had been exposed to semen were less depressed than their peers who had not, concluding: “So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.”
Not that I’m OK with any of this, as I’ve known the ickiness of older male physicians who don’t even realize when they’re being inappropriate.
But this morning I learned from Orac that Dr. Greenfield is the Dr. Greenfield, the one that invented the Greenfield filter. This threw me a bit, because I admire Dr. Greenfield for his work. He’s saved a lot of lives, perhaps tens of thousands. (I’m guessing on this number; it could be more, the point is – a Tsunami’s worth of lives.)
Doctors, including non-surgeons like me, would sometimes advise insertion of Greenfield filters in patients with blood clots and a contraindication to blood thinning. One example of countless I recall in my own experience as an oncologist: an elderly patient with pancreatic cancer and limited mobility who had a DVT in the leg and a brain met. We wouldn’t want to give the patient a standard blood thinner, like heparin or coumadin, because the tumor in the brain might bleed with catastrophic effect.
The common teaching was that a Greenfield filter, inserted through a large thigh vein up to the inferior vena cava, would prevent a blood clot from spreading from a patient’s leg up to the heart’s right chamber and into the lung’s circulation, where it might lodge in the form of a pulmonary embolus, a serious and sometimes lethal condition.
As a patient, I once had a newer-model Greenfield placed on a temporary basis. Because I’d had a major DVT while immobilized after spine surgery for scoliosis as a teenager, and then I had breast cancer – another risk factor for DVT – when I needed spinal repair as an adult in 2003, my orthopedist and hematologist were concerned that my risk for developing another major clot was great. Because they couldn’t put me on an anticoagulant for days after such a big operation, they advised prophylactic insertion of a temporary Greenfield device. I accepted the plan, hesitatingly, as reasonable.
So from both my professional doctor’s and my patient’s perspective, I’ve perceived value in Dr. Greenfield’s contribution and possibly benefited from his work. Then again, a 2000 review in Blood suggests more evidence is needed to support the filters’ widespread use. I agree.
The clearest take, maybe, is that some powerfully driven, innovative and brilliant people make personal mistakes.
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