Professor Zilber was able to explain why people die so often at 4 am.
Analysis of data obtained from medical institutions showed that the peak of mortality among critically ill patients occurs at 4 a.m. For a long time, doctors could not explain the mystery of the morning deaths.
AiF found a person who solved it back in the 1950s. To reduce the mortality rate in his department several times, Anatoly Zilber came to the hospital every day long before the start of the working day. One of the founders of critical care medicine, the creator of the country's first intensive care, anesthesiology and resuscitation service, has not changed this habit to this day. An 87-year-old professor at the republican hospital of Karelia is always from 4 am.
God protects the resourceful
“Observing the patients, I realized that due to the change in the geomagnetic situation at this time, all people have instability of vital functions (breathing, heartbeat, etc.),” explains Professor Anatoly Zilber. - Healthy people do not notice this, and people in critical condition die. To prevent this, we began to prescribe preventive therapy to such patients in the morning at 3.00-3.30. By slightly changing the work schedule of doctors and nurses, we were able to reduce mortality several times."
Anatoly Zilber. Photo by the author.
Anatoly Petrovich does not know how many people he returned from the afterlife, but he remembers the first rescued person well: “The patient suffered cardiac arrest after a severe operation. After a direct heart massage to relieve life-threatening fibrillation, I took advantage of what I found in the ward. It turned out to be a cord from a table lamp. He took two wires, stuck them into the network, touched the bare ends of the heart - and it worked normally. " The patient not only survived, but many years after his resurrection, he sent Anatoly Petrovich a letter with a request to issue him a certificate that he … really died in the doctor's arms in 1958. It turned out that the local doctors at the next examination with the words "Yes, you are healthy as a bull, stop fooling around" wanted to remove his disability.
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When asked how he learned about this method of resuscitation of patients, Anatoly Petrovich replies: “All the most valuable knowledge in life I have learned from books. Thanks to the knowledge of five languages, I also read the works of Western colleagues in foreign scientific journals. There were articles on anesthesiology - in the USSR this branch of medicine did not yet exist. By the way, after that resuscitation I got into the books and realized that the patient survived thanks to a miracle, and not my efforts - for resuscitation, a direct current was needed, not an alternating one. But God, as you know, protects fools, which include enthusiasts. At that time, patients were given ether anesthesia during the operation. Working as an assistant to the renowned surgeon Vasily Baranov (whose name the republican hospital bears today), I understood that surgery cannot develop and improve without anesthesiology,and invited his teacher in outpatient surgery to start training specialists-anesthesiologists at the Institute for Advanced Medical Studies."
Everyone liked the idea. Since in those years no one knew what anesthesia was, officials sent the specialization ticket sent to the Ministry of Health of Karelia to … the Ministry of Culture, deciding that anesthesiology is a philosophy aimed at combating bourgeois aesthetics. After completing the courses, the young doctor stayed to work in his hometown.
“In those years, I was the only doctor-anesthesiologist in Karelia,” Anatoly Petrovich explains. "Going somewhere meant leaving your patients to the mercy of fate."
Since 1964, seminars on the problems of critical care medicine have been held annually at the Petrozavodsk State University on the basis of the Department of Anesthesiology and Reanimation, which after 3 years acquired the international status.
To the envy of Harvard
Today, doctors have equipment that in the 1950s-1960s. doctors never dreamed of.
“We had to create devices for resuscitation from improvised means (now these are the exhibits of the museum of the republican hospital) and invent new methods of anesthesia ourselves,” Anatoly Petrovich recalls. - Once I used the technique of artificial hibernation (immersion in "hibernation") during an operation. Later he abandoned this method as unacceptably dangerous."
But this cunning anesthesia made Anatoly Zilber famous all over the world. At that time, a student was practicing at the Kondopoga Central District Hospital, who later became the head of the department of anesthesiology at Harvard University. In his lectures, the Harvard professor always recalls this unconventional method as an example of the professionalism, audacity and resourcefulness of his Karelian teacher.
Although the need for night visits to the clinic has long disappeared, the long-living professor, despite his venerable age, still arrives for work in the early morning. Now he uses this time for literary work. All dissertations, articles, books (there are more than 480) were prepared by him before the start of the working day. From his office, Professor Zilber communicates with the whole world - with his daughters and grandchildren (they followed in their father's footsteps and work as doctors in the USA), fellow students and students, lectures to students and doctors on Skype, and consults patients. However, his life is not limited to one job.
In addition to medicine, Anatoly Petrovich has many other hobbies. Its library contains 5 thousand volumes - and it contains many unique publications. Among the rarities is the album of the founder of surgery Nikolai Pirogov, which today exists in a single copy.
The professor plays his favorite jazz on the piano (in his youth he was a member of the jazz band of the renowned composer and conductor Ilya Zhak, who wrote songs for Claudia Shulzhenko), and for the weekend he leaves for a dacha, which he completely built with his own hands.
“I survived ten ministers of health and ten chief doctors of the republican hospital of Karelia, I experienced all medical reforms and vicissitudes on myself. In my opinion, most of the problems of modern medicine are generated not by the lack of professional training, but by the fact that today doctors are terribly far from the people, - A. Zilber is sure. “Therefore, in the first place, it is necessary to cultivate an almost forgotten feeling of compassion for the patient. The one that drove the doctor himself all his life.
Lydia Yudina