Monday, August 16, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Doctor breathes life into body donor program

Private medical school in Henderson will teach less-invasive surgery techniques

Michael Crovetti performs a knee replacement operation Tuesday on a 68-year-old patient at St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson. Crovetti is seeking donations of bodies for a program that will teach doctors to perform less-invasive types of surgery and other innovative techniques. Photo by Gary Thompson.

Working in an incision 4 inches wide, Michael Crovetti hammered and sawed on the fine ivory bones of his 68-year-old unconscious patient.

Working with the ease of an ice sculptor, Crovetti performs seven to eight surgeries a day, reshaping hips, knees and shoulder joints at St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson. His less-invasive technique of using smaller incisions is not new, he said. But some doctors are still using older tools and making larger incisions.

Some doctors are "a little nervous," he said, to use smaller incisions.

"So instead of practicing on patients, we're practicing on cadavers."

His patients are alive, but the ones his students -- surgeons taking continuing doctoral education courses -- will practice on at Touro University in January will have listless hips and knees. They will be donors. They will be dead.

Crovetti's Nevada Bio Research Foundation will begin a public relations campaign this fall to urge Nevadans to will their bodies to medical students, surgeons and researchers in Southern Nevada, which currently has no body donor program.

"There are about 12,000 deaths per year in Nevada, and we're hoping to get some of those," said Crovetti, director of the nonprofit foundation.

Crovetti will need about 250 cadavers for his program, which will teach visiting surgeons to perform the less-invasive surgeries at Touro, a private osteopathic medical school in Henderson.

He travels frequently to Arizona, Illinois and Florida, and he will soon head to Germany to teach doctors to replace damaged portions of knees and hips. His method of surgery causes less damage to muscle tissue, and as a result, he said, recovery times are quicker.

Touro's dean, Mitchell Forman, decided to build a facility for Crovetti to teach surgeons after Crovetti performed knee surgery on him in May.

"My knee problem turned out to be a good thing," said Forman, who had three bones replaced. "I was told I would be out of work for six to eight weeks. I returned in 10 days."

The school opened this month and its 15 cadavers came from Loma Linda University in California. It will need between 35 and 40 bodies for anatomy classes in the fall of 2005.

The University of Nevada Medical School in Reno also accepts body donations.

Crovetti said he hopes donors can take satisfaction in knowing they'll be contributing to medical breakthroughs. The bodies won't be used for only anatomy, knee and hip classes. He's hoping to bring other surgical experts into the facility to teach ground-breaking procedures dealing with the heart, brain and spine.

Asking Nevadans to make such donations can be difficult, especially after a scandal this spring at the University of California, Los Angeles. The program suspended its operations after its director was arrested on charges of selling bodies.

In March, Tulane University canceled a partnership with the National Anatomical Service, a national distributor, which sold seven bodies to the government. The U.S. Army used the cadavers to test protective footwear against land mines.

"It's really intimidating to people who are thinking about donating their body to science," said Crovetti of the UCLA incident. "We need to convince people that it's a good thing."

State law prohibits the sale of bodies for profit.

The foundation will offer medical conventions a place to prepare and study specimens in the future, said Terence Ma, director of gross anatomy at Touro.

Ronn Wade, director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board, said health care programs have often brought cadavers or human body parts into hotel convention rooms, which can be a biohazard to hotel guests.

"The concern is you've got ventilation systems, you've got wall to wall carpeting, you can't sterilize the room," Wade said.

Wade, who is also a director of the anatomical services division at the University of Maryland, said Crovetti's biggest challenge will be finding enough bodies quickly to meet student needs.

"Good luck," he said of Crovetti's goal to get 250 donations. "That's a lot."

The University of California, San Diego takes in that many annually; its program has been around since 1968.

"We have over 8,000 people signed up in our program," said Rick Wilson, the university's curator of anatomical preparation.

He praised Touro for starting a program in Southern Nevada and noted there's a large retirement community here that might feel it's something they want to do for the community.

"Just imagine that the physician, before he implants a prosthetic knee joint into your mother or father, has not done it on a cadaver first," Wilson said.

His program scatters donor ashes into the Pacific Ocean from Point Loma. Other schools scatter in forests or bury remains in graveyards located on medical school campuses. Like UCSD, some schools do not allow the families to reclaim the remains.

But Crovetti said families will be able to do so. The foundation will have an annual memorial service to honor the dead who contributed to helping the living. It is also looking into purchasing a burial plot for other cadavers, Ma said.

"It sounds terrible but funerals are very expensive these days and there is a population out there who wants to donate the body," Ma said. "Not only is it a great legacy to the future but they know all the costs of the preparation and cremation of the body are taken care of."