When you hear of brain surgery, you picture an unconscious person and a group of neurosurgeons busy operating on his/her brain. Well, let’s have a bit of a paradigm shift; imagine a brain surgery with the patient fully awake. Shocking, right?
Now hear this, the practice called awake craniotomy has been in Kenya and dates back to the 1950s. Okay, maybe that’s a lot of information to handle at once. Let’s breakdown this practice into more digestible bits.
What is Craniotomy?
John Hopkins medicine defines craniotomy as the surgical removal of part of the bone from the skull using specialized tools to expose the brain.
Yeah, you guessed right, awake craniotomy is simply craniotomy with the individual being operated on fully awake. No anesthesia. Why, you may I ask? The sole purpose of this type of brain surgery is to reduce the potential risk of brain damage.
Here’s the thing, during normal surgery, where the patient is unconscious, monitoring the individual’s neurological state is quite difficult. But with awake craniotomy, the neurosurgeon gets live feedback, for example, whether the patient’s communication has been interfered with or what the effect is when the doctor touches a certain part of the patient’s brain.
Experts in matters brain have highlighted that awake craniotomy has been useful in removing brain tumors-at any stage of growth- safely. Moreover, tissues causing epileptic seizures can be removed in the same manner. The practice has since gained favor among neurosurgeons and has been demystified as a medical taboo.
Pre-Colonial Craniotomy
I earlier stated that awake craniotomy dates back to the 1950s in Kenya. Ababari Emetwe, the traditional neurosurgeons’ local name, practiced awake craniotomy among the Kisii, a Bantu community in South Nyanza. The Kisii carried this type of medical practice before its documentation in the 1980s, only that it was termed as trepanation.
Texts contained in ‘Trepanation of The Skull by The Medicine-men of Primitive Cultures, With Particular Reference to Present-day Native East African Practice,’ by Edward Lambert Margetts (in Proceedings of the Third World Congress of Psychiatry, Montreal: University of Toronto Press/McGill University Press, Vol. II, 1962), show a great deal of technical similarities between today’s awake craniotomy and trepanation.
The Bantu community’s practice in Kenya was majorly performed to correct chronic head pain after trauma to the head. Years-long observation of the practice has established that it has a 5% fatality rate, which is positive.
Modern Awake Craniotomy in Kenya
On October 15, 2015, Kenya did her first awake craniotomy at Nakuru Level 5 hospital. The historical operation was carried out by a team of surgeons led by Dr. Samuel Njiru, Kenyatta National Hospital’s locally trained neurosurgeon, in collaboration with Egerton University and the University of Toronto.
With Dr. Njiru still heading a team at Nakuru Level 5 hospital, subsequent surgeries were conducted in 2018 on four other different patients.
Dr. Mubashir Mahmood Qureshi, a locally trained neurosurgeon from the University of Nairobi and the current Chairman of the Neurological Society of Kenya, together with Dr. Aamir Qureshi, is recent to carry out awake craniotomy on October 26 at Nairobi Hospital.
With improving technology and an increase in the number of specialists to perform an awake craniotomy, the medical practice is gaining ground not only in private but also in public hospitals. Nairobi hospital is an example of a medical facility that is well equipped both technologically and medical personnel to carry out the procedure.
Therefore, it can be logically concluded that the African continent had its medical procedures that were in a way or two similar to the procedures used or adopted by Western Countries.
MORE:
