In the first of this three-part series examining new medical frontiers, Professor Robert Winston looks at the cutting-edge surgical robots already operating and questions whether they are really providing patients with a useful service. Professor Winston begins his journey as a very cynical observer - how could a robot ever take over that sacred, very human, relationship between a doctor and patient? The question is - how does he feel at the end of his journey? The programme follows a tiny baby undergoing a robotic operation in Leeds and shows the extraordinary Neuroarm in action, a robot that allows surgeons to see inside a patient's brain - and feel it - without taking the skull off.
In the second of this three-part series examining new medical frontiers, Professor Robert Winston looks at the challenge to harness the body's own repair system. What if we could grow and regenerate parts of our own body? It sounds like science fiction, but scientists and doctors believe they have already found the answer - stem cells. Amazing claims have been made about stem cells, and they have been the subject of Professor Winston's own research for years. Miracle cures for every possible disease are promised on the internet, most of them from countries such as Argentina and Siberia where regulations are less strict. The reason is that miracle cures are, as yet, completely without medical evidence. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence, but real medical trials are only just beginning. We pick up on the first British trial for stem cells as a treatement for heart attacks and heart disease and follow a patient offering himself as a guinea pig in a double trial - so he's unsure whether he is getting the real or dummy treatement. But it is the only way science will know if stem cells work. We also see a family who sought treatment for their brain damaged son, and lost everything, 180,000 pounds and their son's life, in a desperate bid to obtain stem cell treatments in unregulated clinics across the world. And we look at the plight of desperate patients, willing to try anything to save the lives of loved ones, and question how medicine can best use such patients to advance medicine and cross new frontiers, rather than letting them suffer or die in vain.
Final in the series examining new medical frontiers looks at the opposite of the high-cost/high-technology world people expect to coincide with cutting-edge medical care. The programme examines the work of orthopaedic surgeon Steve Mannion, who has devoted his life to working in far-flung and under-resourced corners of the world. Most of his work is done in places where there is no technology and no money, so everything has to be done through sheer human ingenuity - which Steve has in spades. The programme follows him to Malawi, one of the poorest countries on earth. There he has several clinics for children and adults with club feet but, as the only surgeon for seven million people in the northern area of the country, never has the time to perform all the necessary surgery on his own. Instead he came up with a new, non-surgical solution - that he could train staff in Malawi to perform as well - to keep up with the great demand. Steve started using a little known and scarcely used physiotherapy treatment called the Ponseti treatment on the children in Malawi, and found it to be very successful - even better than the surgical treatment used in Britain. The programme follows the Ponseti treatment - both in Africa and Britain - and tells the story of Steve's struggle to overcome deep-set traditions and practices to eventually cross a new medical frontier.