History
Artificial disc surgery is still relatively new in the United States, but has been used in Europe for more than 15 years.
The first device approved for use in the United States was the Charite artificial disc. Invented at Charite University Hospital in Berlin in the mid-1980s by the East German scientist, two-time Olympic champion in women's artistic gymnastics Karin Büttner-Janz and Kurt Schellnack, the disc received FDA approval in the United States in October 2004, following a four-year clinical trial.
The first surgeon to perform a Charite artificial disc surgery in the United States was Scott Blumenthal, M.D., a spine surgeon at Texas Back Institute in Plano, Texas. Blumenthal served as principal investigator for the Charite study in the US.
Dr. Rudolf Bertagnoli helped to develop Pro Disc and its surgical technique in Europe and has taught more than 2,500 surgeons how to perform the procedure.
Read more about this topic: Intervertebral Disc Arthroplasty
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)