In 1968, in a remark as wise as it is learned, Professor George Clark wrote of The Battle of Maldon that “what the poet does not create does not exist even if history inspires his poem.” Readers of the poem have been mulling this over for forty years. The historical information the poem affords us has been subject, in some degree, to alteration by imagination, to the formulae of verse, and to t...

In his article on poetry in health care education, Neil Pickering puts forward an argument of radical unpredictability: as we can never know in advance how a poem will be interpreted, it can be of no external use.(1) It is, however, exactly this potential to give rise to multiple interpretations that makes the poem valuable. We hold that the poem should be read and discussed with no other inten...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Per-oral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) is a new minimally invasive technique to treat achalasia. METHODS We performed a review of the literature of POEM with a special focus on technical details and the results obtained with this technique in patients with achalasia and other esophageal motility disorders. RESULTS Thousands of POEM procedures have been performed worldwide since ...

With the accumulation of clinical trials demonstrating its efficacy and safety, peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) has emerged as a less invasive treatment option for esophageal achalasia compared with laparoscopic Heller myotomy. However, the difficulty in determining the exact extent of myotomy, a critical factor associated with the success and safety of the procedure, remains a limitation. Al...

Peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) has been developed in the context of natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) as a minimally invasive endoscopic treatment for symptomatic esophageal achalasia, which is a chronic progressive benign disease with severe morbidity and difficult management. Since September 2008, POEM has been successfully performed in more than 200 consecutive patie...

Peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) is a new endoscopic treatment for achalasia with very good short-term results in adults. Data about POEM in pediatric patients are missing. We present the case of a 10-year-old male patient with type I (classic) achalasia, successfully treated with POEM. The procedure was accomplished in a similar fashion to the technique used in adults. Short-term results were...

Peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) is a minimally invasive procedure for treating esophageal achalasia. During POEM, carbon dioxide is insufflated under pressure into the esophagus and stomach, which can cause clinically significant capnoperitoneum, capnomediastinum, or capnothorax. We present a case in which gas accumulation in the abdomen during POEM had adverse effects on ventilation. Once th...

BACKGROUND Peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) as a new approach to achalasia attracts broad attention. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the results with esophageal motility after POEM through the first large sample clinical research. PATIENTS AND METHODS We have a self-control research with all patients (205 in total) who underwent POEM from 2010 to 2014 at our Digestive End...

We aimed to assess the short-term outcomes of per-oral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) compared with laparoscopic Heller myotomy (LHM) for achalasia through a meta-analysis of nonrandomized comparative studies.We searched PubMed, Embase, Medline, Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar for studies that compared POEM and LHM for achalasia and were published between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2014. ...

Sundown of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the World Wide Web. A decade later, semantic web (SW) envisioned enriching of web-accessible information and services with machine-processable semantics to solve the problems of information management and sharing which are aroused by the success of the web. However, success of the SW largely depends on the availability of formal ontologies f...