Akbar Hussain
Appearances
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: From security guard to sculptor at the Met Museum
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Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: From security guard to sculptor at the Met Museum
Akbar, tell us a bit about this device, how it's fitted, how it works. So it's in two parts, really. The main part is the battery itself, which contains the computer chip as well. It's developed from cardiac pacemaker technology, but instead of hooking it up to wires that go to the heart... I hook it up to wires that I've implanted into the middle of the brain.
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: From security guard to sculptor at the Met Museum
Once it's in the right place, you can then send little pulses of energy to these deep brain structures. And the wiring or the electrical activity that is not quite working well in these different disease processes, such as Parkinson's disease or dystonia or essential tremor, We can fine-tune the stimulus so we can get rid of some of the symptoms that the patient's suffering from.
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: From security guard to sculptor at the Met Museum
It's effective and helps about 80% of people who have the deep brain stimulation device. But there is a group of people that it might not help as well as it's helped Kevin.
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: From security guard to sculptor at the Met Museum
There must be risks. There's no such thing as brain surgery without any risks, unfortunately. But out of all the different types of brain surgery that we do... this is probably the safest one we do because it's very minimally intrusive.
Global News Podcast
The Happy Pod: From security guard to sculptor at the Met Museum
The deep brain stimulation doesn't modify the disease process. You still have Parkinson's disease. The symptoms will progress over time. Now, how long it takes to progress is individual. It's different for different people. I don't think that we'll have to worry about the longevity being just a couple of years. I think it is, we're talking about decades.