The Health Blog remembers none too fondly having to eat nothing but mush after getting our braces tightened by the orthodontist oh so many years ago. Now imagine getting magnets adjusted to pull your chest out. Sound appealing? Well, compared with surgery to crack the chest open, it just might be a less painful way to go.
A teenage boy recently became the first patient to try the new approach to repair a sunken chest, called pectus excavatum in medical lingo. His experience was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle. Pectus excavatum, described in more detail here, can arise when children grow up and their sternums and ribs fold in. It’s a problem in about 1 in 800 births.
A surgeon at UCSF Children’s Hospital attached a magnet the size of a hockey puck to Richard’s sternum, which is now slowly being pulled outward by a second magnet stuck to a brace the boy wears on his chest.
Michael Harrison, told the Chronicle, “I was doing these brutal surgeries on kids, and I hated it.”
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