Cadavers

[Guest guest]

Catherine,

 

that does sound interesting...can you give more information? Six days? How

can anyone afford to spend six days in a workshop?

 

Julie

[Guest guest]

>that does sound interesting...can you give more information? Six days?

>How can anyone afford to spend six days in a workshop?

 

Gil Hedley at www.somanautics.com gives workshops all around the country,

generally at medical schools where dissection labs are set up. He

schedules them from Monday through Saturday. He was trained as a Rolfer

but has been teaching anatomy for a number of years. He is good at

taking participants through the often arduous work of dissection,

addressing emotional as well as technical issues.

 

The course was set up with 17 participants, and three instructors. He

advertises the workshop for bodyworkers and health care professionals who

have mastered the basics of their professions, but is open to serious

students outside of the health professions who can convince him to make

an exception. There were two cadavers, with 7-8 people working on each.

This provided sufficient labor to remove layers, isolate parts, fluff

muscles, explore organs and generally uncover an understanding of the

health of the women we worked upon.

 

We did not learn the ages or causes of death until the third or fourth

day, but generally formed impressions as we started through the layers.

In our case, we had a woman around 65 with a brain shunt, a chemo port

and a herniated scar below the umbilicus. As we explored her we

discovered that she had her uterus and ovaries removed, causing prolapse

of her intestines. The scar had herniated, causing her intestines to push

out, showing the effects of the high and low pressure systems of the

visceral bags. Her liver, brains, intestinal wall, spleen and brain were

riddled with fibrous tumors and her breasts showed signs of stagnation

and phlegm, with compressed dark fat along her bra line and hard cysts.

Her spleen was unusually small and had necrotic tissue at one side. Her

liver was huge and parts were hard, indicating a reduced ability to

filter blood. Her cervix (not removed in the hysterectomy) showed that

she had borne children. Nonetheless her muscles were strong and her

posture was upright. Lungs with external carbon deposits showed exposure

to pollutants, but probably did not indicate she was a smoker.

Auricular points had shown abnormalities in the uterus, liver and brain.

Her tongue had a central depression and was swollen on her left side,

but that might be an artifact of the enbalming. Official cause of death,

we learned was ovarian cancer, but to tell the truth she had so much

cancer in her body that it could have been failure in a number of areas.

 

By going down slowly layer by layer (which is unusual compared to the way

the medical students in the next lab were studying-perhaps because they

needed to keep a cadaver going for 3-6 months,) we were able to study the

connective tissue, the richness of the fat with its blood and nerves,

individual layers of even tiny muscles, to trace nerve pathways and to

palpate for points directly upon muscle layers. We were encouraged to

feel shapes, weight and connections while parts of the body were exposed

but intact. For example, to run our hands under the lungs and heart in

the thoracic cavity after ribs were removed and to feel the heft of the

organs and how high the cavity goes. (Gotta watch for puncturing the

pleura even above the acromium!) The image of the lungs embracing the

heart on 3 1/2 sides does not come across in most anatomy books. Nor

does the way the lesser omentum can move over to cradle injured organs.

And I won't be satisfied with an anatomy book that shows the small

intestines as a tube when most of the tissue is rich mesentery, with the

intestinal tube attached like the ruffle on a skirt.

 

Most people there took a week's vacation. I arranged to miss classes

because I cannot conceive of studying medicine, Oriental or otherwise

without seeing the intricacy of a human cadaver. And with the newer

acetone-preserved cadavers OM schools without refrigeration facilities

should be able to provide this.

 

Karen Vaughan

CreationsGarden

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" Research is the act of going up alleys to see if they are blind. " -

Plutarch

 

 

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