I am Wolf Schweitzer, born in 1967, and in May 2007, my right middle hand started to exhibit a localized region of swelling that was painful. In September 2007, I started to get the first medical diagnostics and surgery.

What happened?

The local doctors / hospitals seemed not overly capable of managing my locally recurring and spreading whitish small tissue growths in my right hand, that were very painful, and that had started to give me problems in 2007. Thus, a technically better setting was chosen in Mt St Elsewhere, at a global reference hospital, where a relative of mine, me and an extremely experienced orthopedic hand surgery specialist doctor ultimately co-signed the papers for amputation as best course of treatment after three days of repeating every thinkable step of examination and lab test, as I had determined this to be a more responsible course of action.

The aftermath around the previously locally involved and affected specialists or doctors seemed considerable, but they (i.e., all involved people and those that involved themselves) could have, at any step along the way, acted responsibly, and they also could have acted according to the law, were they inclined in such a way. As recommendation generally, I would cautiously suggest any doctors to not use unacceptably high and incompatible drugs without subsequent responsible patient surveillance or monitoring, I would also suggest to consider full lab tests and not selective ones, leaving out relative results, I would suggest to take patient consent and information rather seriously, and to not openly talk about putting a patient under against his consent or actually go through with such, I would strongly suggest to not invent specialist diagnoses, as such later may end up being declared to lack credibility by insurances after review, and I would suggest to definitely take patient data confidentiality at least a bit more seriously. Otherwise, all sorts of things could happen. Maybe you could not even bill for your “services”. Or wouldn’t you think so. Conversely, I do not think it is my duty to react to any of such possibilities if ever they occurred in any manner one would consider expected or standard, or average or typical. I guess that is about where it’s at.

At any rate, below elbow amputation also is a technical subject. We recently wrote up the experiences with comparison and tweaking, of both body-powered and myoelectric technology, as a scientific article. Check here: publication [link]

You can send me an e-mail to wuff at swisswuff.ch.