This college dropout was bedridden for 11 years. Then he invented a surgery and cured himself

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/27/health/doug-lindsay-invented-surgery-trnd/index.html

作者   By Ryan Prior, CNN

Updated 0718 GMT (1518 HKT) July 27, 2019

(CNN)Doug Lindsay was 21 and starting his senior year at Rockhurst University, a Jesuit college in Kansas City, Missouri, when his world imploded.

After his first day of classes, the biology major collapsed at home on the dining room table, the room spinning around him.

It was 1999. The symptoms soon became intense and untreatable. His heart would race, he felt weak and he frequently got dizzy. Lindsay could walk only about 50 feet at a time and couldn't stand for more than a few minutes.

"Even lying on the floor didn't feel like it was low enough," he said.

The former high school track athlete had dreamed of becoming a biochemistry professor or maybe a writer for "The Simpsons."

Instead, he would spend the next 11 years mostly confined to a hospital bed in his living room in St. Louis, hamstrung by a mysterious ailment.

Doctors were baffled. Treatments didn't help. And Lindsay eventually realized that if he wanted his life back, he would have to do it himself.

His journey since has amazed medical professionals.

"He did something extraordinary," said John Novack, spokesman for Inspire, a healthcare social network for rare and chronic-disease patients. When people hear Lindsay's story, Novack said, they often say, "I can do something similar for my kid."

His mother was a living prophecy

Whatever was wrong with him ran in the family.

By the time Lindsay was 18 months old, his mother was so weak she could no longer pick him up.

By the time he was 4 she could no longer walk. She did manage to pick him up one more time that year, when he was choking on a jawbreaker. She saved his life.

Otherwise, she was too frail. She lived for decades, mostly bedridden with the same condition that stole her son's twenties. After years of tests, she determined her condition was related to her thyroid, but she was too sick to travel to the Mayo Clinic to get more specialized care, Lindsay said.

Lindsay's aunt also developed the same ailment, growing so feeble she couldn't tie her own shoes. 后续 见下页 

这位大学辍学生卧床不起11年。然后他发明了一种手术并治好了自己

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/27/health/doug-lindsay-invented-surgery-trnd/index.html

作者：美国有线电视新闻网的Ryan Prior

格林威治标准时间0718（1518 HKT）更新时间：2019年7月27日

（CNN）Doug Lindsay今年21岁，在密苏里州堪萨斯城的耶稣会学院Rockhurst大学开始他的高年级，当时他的世界崩溃了。

上课第一天后，生物学专业在餐桌上的家中倒塌，房间在他周围旋转。

那是1999年。症状很快就变得激烈而无法治愈。他的心会比赛，他感到虚弱，经常头晕。 Lindsay一次只能行走大约50英尺，不能站立超过几分钟。

“即使躺在地板上也不觉得它足够低，”他说。

这位前高中田径运动员曾梦想成为一名生物化学教授，或者也许是“辛普森一家”的作家。

相反，他将在接下来的11年里，大部分时间都被限制在圣路易斯的起居室的医院病床上，被一种神秘的疾病困扰着。

医生们感到很困惑。治疗没有帮助。 Lindsay最终意识到，如果他想要恢复生命，他必须亲自去做。

他的旅程让医疗专业人士惊叹不已。

“他做了不同寻常的事情，”Inspire的发言人约翰·诺瓦克说，他是一家针对罕见和慢性疾病患者的医疗社交网络。当人们听到Lindsay的故事时，Novack说，他们经常说，“我可以为我的孩子做类似的事情。”

他的母亲是一个活生生的预言

他在家里遇到了什么问题。

当林赛18个月大的时候，他的母亲非常虚弱，无法再接他了。

到他4岁时，她再也走不动了。那年她确实设法再次接他，当时他正在窒息一个令人伤心的笨蛋。她救了他的命。

否则，她太脆弱了。她生活了几十年，大部分都是卧床不起的，她的儿子二十几岁就被偷走了。 Lindsay说，经过多年的测试，她确定自己的病情与她的甲状腺有关，但她病得太重，无法前往梅奥诊所接受更专业的护理。

Lindsay的姨妈也患上了同样的疾病，变得如此虚弱，她无法系鞋带。

另外 报道介绍 

https://medicinex.stanford.edu/medx-speakers/doug-lindsay/

About Me

At the young age of 21, Doug Lindsay faced an almost impossible challenge when he was forced to drop out of college after developing a mysterious, debilitating illness. The doctors were stumped. His heart would race; the room would spin; his muscles would cramp and ache – and all this if he’d stand for longer than a commercial break or walk further than 50 feet. Time passed and he didn’t get better. Doug spent 22 hours a day stuck in a hospital bed in his living room for eleven years… until he figured out what was wrong, developed novel treatments to keep it at bay, and then developed the surgery that fixed him!

Without a college degree or even the health to leave his house, Doug Lindsay built and led an interdisciplinary team of medical experts from across the nation and the world in his effort to translate a long forgotten animal surgery into a modern human surgery. He persevered, taught himself to become a world authority on aspects of his condition and treatment, developed new uses for 5 prescription drugs, and built relationships with senior faculty at more than two dozen institutions – all in an unprecedented, 21st century effort to innovate his way back to health. He earned the right to bet his life on the operating table for the surgery he’d rescued from the past… and it paid off!

Once recovered, Doug went back to school and finished his biology degree. Now, Doug lectures and creates workshops on how unyielding belief and resilience factor into innovation, on how to innovate in a trust based environment, on character’s role in success, and on how viewing failure like a scientist can help you persevere and win!

Title: Speaker, Workshop Guru, Scientist, Filmmaker

Company/Affiliation: Doug Says LLC

关于我

在年轻的21岁时，Doug Lindsay面临着一个几乎不可能的挑战，当他在发展出一种神秘的，使人衰弱的疾病后被迫退学。医生很难过。他的心会比赛;房间会旋转;他的肌肉会痉挛和疼痛 - 如果他站立的时间长于商业休息时间或走路超过50英尺，那么这一切都是如此。时间过去了，他没有好转。道格每天花22个小时在他的起居室的医院病床上呆了11年......直到他弄清楚出了什么问题，开发了新的治疗方法以防止它被淹没，然后开发了修复他的手术！

Doug Lindsay没有大学学位甚至没有离开家的健康，他建立并领导了来自全国乃至全世界的跨学科医学专家团队，努力将长期被遗忘的动物手术转化为现代人类手术。他坚持不懈，自学成为他的病情和治疗方面的世界权威，开发了5种处方药的新用途，并与20多个机构的高级教师建立了关系 - 所有这些都是前所未有的21世纪创新他的努力恢复健康的方式。他有权在手术台上赌他过去救出的手术......并且得到了回报！

一旦康复，道格就回到学校并完成了他的生物学学位。现在，Doug讲授和创建研讨会，讨论如何将不屈不挠的信念和弹性因素纳入创新，如何在基于信任的环境中进行创新，如何在角色的成功中扮演角色，以及如何像科学家一样观看失败可以帮助您坚持并赢得胜利！

标题：演讲者，工作坊大师，科学家，电影制片人

Still, other than doctors' visits, a high school reunion and a few weddings, Lindsay's autonomic dysfunction kept him mostly confined to the house he grew up in well beyond his twenties.

Why was he so sick, he wondered? Something was dumping way too much adrenaline into his blood.

Coghlan told him he might have an adrenal tumor. But three scans of his adrenal glands all came back negative.

Discouraged but not deterred, Lindsay did the only thing he could do: He dove back into the medical literature.

And he came up with a treasure.

Later he diagnosed a disorder doctors didn't believe could exist

Lindsay suspected there might be something in his adrenal gland that acted like a tumor, but wasn't one.

A fourth scan in 2006 showed his adrenals "glowing brightly," Lindsay said, an abnormality consistent with his new theory.

Coghlan called Lindsay and said, "We found it!" The diagnosis: bilateral adrenal medullary hyperplasia.

In layman's terms, it means the medullas, or inner regions, of his adrenal glands were enlarged and acting like tumors. His adrenal glands were producing way too much adrenaline.

Experts in the field doubted the diagnosis. But Coghlan put his professional reputation on the line to back it.

As Lindsay delved into more medical literature, he found only 32 recorded cases of bilateral adrenal medullary hyperplasia.

And he fixed on what seemed like a simple solution: If he could cut out the medullas of his adrenal glands -- sort of like slicing into a hard-boiled egg and removing the yolk -- his health would improve.

Dr. Chris Bauer, Lindsay's personal physician, calls his ailment an "atypical presentation of a rare disease."

"They don't really write textbooks based on that," Bauer said. "We were were all learning with Doug as we went along."

Then he pioneered a new surgery

Lindsay finally came to a bold conclusion. "If there isn't a surgery," he decided, "I'm going to make one."

His first big lead came in 2008. He found a 1980 study from a scientist at Georgia State University, which he summed up as: "You slice the rat's adrenal gland with a razor blade and squeeze it so the medulla pops out like a pimple."

Then he found that another version of the adrenal medulla extraction had been done at Harvard. Renowned professor Walter Bradford Cannon had performed the surgery on cats in 1926. Lindsay found records of the surgery being done on dogs as well.

He built a 363-page PDF which proposed a first-ever human adrenal medullectomy.

Then he spent the next 18 months working to find a surgeon who would oversee the unorthodox procedure.

Pioneering a new surgery is a high-wire act for ethical and financial reasons as well. Surgeons could risk losing their license by performing an unproven operation, especially if complications arose. And insurance companies tend to not reimburse patients for non-standard procedures.

Because many of the doctors in that specialized field knew each other, Lindsay was careful where he pitched the idea that might save his life.

Eventually he recruited a surgeon from the University of Alabama-Birmingham. In September 2010 Lindsday went to the university hospital, where the doctor successfully extracted one of his adrenal medullas.

Three weeks after the procedure, Lindsay could sit upright for three hours. By Christmas Eve, he had the strength to walk a mile to church.

As he stood in the back of the church during midnight Mass, it finally felt like hope was winning.

But progress was slow. In 2012, he underwent a second surgery at Washington University in St. Louis to remove the medulla from his remaining adrenal gland.

A year later, he was well enough to fly with friends to the Bahamas. It was the first time in his life the Midwesterner had seen the ocean.

By early 2014, he was coming off some of his meds.

Coghlan, his champion, lived just long enough to see Lindsay's remarkable recovery. He died in 2015.

尽管如此，除了医生的访问，高中团聚和一些婚礼，Lindsay的自主神经功能障碍使他大部分时间都被限制在他长大的二十多岁的房子里。

他想知道为什么他这么病了？有什么东西在他的血液中倾倒太多的肾上腺素。

Coghlan告诉他，他可能患有肾上腺肿瘤。但他对肾上腺的三次扫描均显示为阴性。

Lindsay气馁但没有阻止，他做了他唯一能做的事情：他回到了医学文献中。

他想出了一个宝藏。

后来他诊断出一种医生认为不存在的疾病

Lindsay怀疑他的肾上腺可能有某种东西像肿瘤一样，但不是一种。

Lindsay说，2006年的第四次扫描显示他的肾上腺“明亮地发光”，这与他的新理论一致。

Coghlan打电话给Lindsay说：“我们发现了它！”诊断：双侧肾上腺髓质增生。

通俗地说，这意味着他的肾上腺的髓质或内部区域被扩大并且像肿瘤一样。他的肾上腺产生过多的肾上腺素。

该领域的专家怀疑诊断。但是，Coghlan将他的专业声誉放在了支持线上。

随着Lindsay深入研究更多的医学文献，他发现只记录了32例双侧肾上腺髓质增生病例。

他确定了一个简单的解决方案：如果他能切断肾上腺的髓质 - 有点像切成一个煮熟的鸡蛋并去掉蛋黄 - 他的健康状况会有所改善。

Lindsay的私人医生克里斯鲍尔博士称他的病是“罕见疾病的非典型表现”。

“他们并没有真正根据这一点编写教科书，”鲍尔说。 “当我们一起去的时候，我们都和Doug一起学习。”

然后他开创了一种新手术

林赛终于得出了一个大胆的结论。 “如果没有手术，”他决定，“我要做一个。”

他在2008年获得了他的第一个重要领导。他在乔治亚州立大学的一位科学家那里找到了1980年的一项研究，他总结道：“你用剃刀刀片将大鼠的肾上腺切片并挤压它，使髓质像疙瘩一样弹出。 “

然后他发现哈佛大学已经完成了另一种肾上腺髓质提取术。着名教授Walter Bradford Cannon于1926年对猫进行了手术.Lindsay也发现了对狗进行手术的记录。

他制作了一份长达363页的PDF文件，提出了首例人体肾上腺髓质切除术。

然后，他在接下来的18个月里一直在寻找能够监督非正统程序的外科医生。

由于道德和经济原因，开创一项新手术也是一种高线诉讼。外科医生可能会因执行未经证实的手术而失去执照，特别是如果出现并发症。保险公司往往不会为非标准程序报销患者。

因为那个专业领域的许多医生彼此认识，所以Lindsay小心翼翼地提出可能挽救他生命的想法。

最终，他从阿拉巴马大学伯明翰分校招募了一名外科医生。 2010年9月Lindsday去了大学医院，医生成功地取出了他的一个肾上腺髓质。

手术后三周，Lindsay可以坐直三个小时。 到圣诞节前夕，他有力量走到教堂一英里。

午夜弥撒时他站在教堂后面，终于感觉到希望正在赢得胜利。

但进展缓慢。 2012年，他在圣路易斯的华盛顿大学接受了第二次手术，从其剩余的肾上腺中取出髓质。

一年后，他很好地和朋友一起飞往巴哈马群岛。 这是他一生中第一次见到西太平洋人。

到2014年初，他正在解雇他的一些药物。

Coghlan，他的冠军，住了足够长的时间，看到Lindsay的显着复苏。 他于2015年去世。