{"id":2,"date":"2008-07-14T21:07:35","date_gmt":"2008-07-14T19:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2026-04-15T12:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T10:40:10","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/?page_id=2","title":{"rendered":"About"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-7798 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/swtechbw-217x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"217\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/swtechbw-217x300.jpg 217w, https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/swtechbw-768x1062.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/swtechbw.jpg 740w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 217px) 100vw, 217px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The local doctors \/ hospitals seemed, politely put, 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 ultimately chosen in Mt St Elsewhere, at a global reference hospital, where a relative of mine acting as my legal representative of sorts, 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 we all had determined this to be a more responsible course of action than extensively getting in the hair with (they know who, we have all their names). Such things do happen though.<\/p>\n<p>The aftermath around the previously locally involved and affected specialists or doctors apparently turned out to be, not surprisingly, considerable. They (i.e., those that involved themselves) could have, at any step along the way, acted responsibly, and they also could have acted according to the law, had they ever been inclined in such a way. As a recommendation generally, I would cautiously suggest clinical doctors to not administer unacceptably high and incompatible drugs, at least not without subsequent responsible and sufficiently extensive patient surveillance or monitoring. As far as I remember, I did file a critical incident report somewhere along the line. I would also suggest such people to consider comprehensive lab tests of all that is really relevant, and not just insufficiently selective items. I would suggest to take patient consent and information rather seriously, and to particularly not openly talk about putting a patient under against his consent or actually go through with such in front of the patient that then learns more about you than you were ever willing to give away. I would strongly suggest to not invent specialist diagnoses out of the blue, as tempting as it may appear, and boy were they tempted. Such invented stuff later may end up being declared to lack credibility by insurances, after review. While one may feel the ultimate itch and triggered to play a case as a moral game, or, view it as necessity to take biased views, to take sides, to overshare such views, it may turn out to actually be a very difficult technical game that would have required a fundamentally different and fundamentally professional and empathic legally correct approach from the get go and every hour thereafter. As part of that consideration, I would add the suggestion to definitely take patient data confidentiality at least a bit seriously. Maybe one could not even bill for their &#8220;services&#8221; if there is no informed consent. In any such wrongly valued scenario, all sorts of things could happen, and, boy, did all sorts of things happen. Maybe their course of action could draw in others in unprecedented and tragically fatal ways, or, hold on, maybe it really did? We would hope that no one died. After all, hope dies last, it is what remains in the box of Pandora. But maybe someone did. Then, that&#8217;d be bad.<\/p>\n<p>And then, a few years ago, I checked in to the same institution to get checked for some inherited condition. I explicitly had told them that we needed that tag and label for our family so the other relatives could wave that tag label around as probable cause and get taken seriously and also checked, in their respective jurisdictions and healthcare systems. And even though I had all the relevant criteria as these were\/are all there, these people, they said, we cannot go ahead, just because we do not recognize any therapeutic relevance for me. But I had told them the actual reason. And so, like, they had to measure my full arm span. Measuring my intact left arm to spine and multiplying it by two resulted in an overly large span, part of that score, but they wrote that cannot be done because my right arm is too short. Someone must have uninstalled the + key on the pocket calculator of these doctors, highly unusual, as the + would be the only math operation that clinically practicing doctors would ever need and apply, as our physics professor told us back in the days. As one of the things one does as these people, they selectively made math operation + unavailable. Then they, three women folks doctors, asked whether I did have soft skin. I answered that my wife said so. They looked at each other and laughed and bickered, &#8220;his wife said so, what does a wife know&#8221;. Something in my face must have set them off then so the most exploratory looking of them approached me as I sat ther asking may I touch your skin, and she carefully rolled a bit of my skin between her fingers, and with wide big open eyes went, oh that is really soft, may the others &#8230; too, and lo and behold the three of them, like in a bad movie, twisted my skin between their fingers going ah and oh, that now is really very soft skin. They wrote that they did not have any findings in their final report, totally different from what they had said when I was there. A bit later, as these conditions do seem not just go away just like that, and as their presence does not at all seem without conseqences, as was indicated by these medical doctors, our family still lacked proper probable cause to get their specialists do serious medical checks in their own health care systems and jurisdictions. Then my niece aged 21 dies suddenly, sudden death, of all that could be gathered, and what was found at medicolegal autopsy it was a cardiac death. After everyone here had &#8220;skillfully&#8221; downplayed these aspects, against clear explicit request, and against all better knowledge. I find it astonishing to experience a bit of what these people all take upon themselves, and what goals do they seem to pursue! I did send them that update but obviously no response, who knows if the future holds a communication or customer service course for these individuals.<\/p>\n<p>Conversely, I do not think it is my specific duty to react to any of such possibilities, at all. Or to conform to any expectation or standard when doing so. So whatever is going on, we don&#8217;t know what will happen in advance.\u00a0 I guess that is about where it&#8217;s at. Like, not always does the same type of elevator arrive, when a particular button is pushed.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, below elbow amputation is not only a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/?p=14064\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">social<\/a> but also a technical subject. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/?p=8066\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">We recently wrote up the experiences with comparison and tweaking, of both body-powered and myoelectric technology, as a scientific article. Check here<\/a>: publication [<a href=\"https:\/\/jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com\/articles\/10.1186\/s12984-017-0340-0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">link<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>You can send me an e-mail to <a href=\"mailto:wuff@swisswuff.ch\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">wuff at swisswuff.ch<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=swisswuff\" class=\"twitter-share-button\" data-size=\"large\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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. The local doctors \/ hospitals seemed, politely put, not overly capable of managing my locally recurring&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","wpcat-1-id"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 11:32:37","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":91,"href":"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14085,"href":"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/14085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swisswuff.ch\/tech\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}