By
Ayse Guner
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Endoscopy can aid in disease detection, yield an ancient mummy's identification
After two years of waiting, a new endoscopy suite in the University Medical Center will enable more sophisticated interaction between doctors and their patients.
The 7,800-square-foot endoscopy facility - four times larger than the current one - will open on Dec. 18. It will provide highly technological equipment, including new endoscopy scopes, monitors, processors and voice recognition dictation systems, which are computers that document what doctors say to patients.
The project also embodies a new liver institute as well as gastroenterology laboratories. About 20 physicians will work in the facility, most coming from other states to practice in their fields.
Their fields include s adult gastroenterology, pediatric gastroenterology, adult pulmonology and pediatric pulmonology.
Gastroenterology is the study of gastrointestinal disorders, and pulmonology relates to lung diseases.
Doctors that worked in the current endoscopy laboratory said the lack of a patient waiting room, crammed procedure rooms and recovery areas often caused problems, forcing patients to look for alternative hospitals to get care.
Patients would often occupy the clinic s while they waited to see doctors, which would create an unpleasant environment in the laboratory, said Dr. Raymond Moldow, a UA clinical associate professor of medicine.
The limited space in the laboratory also resulted in a stressful environment as doctors tried to do proper work, he added.
The $2 million facility was funded through the hospital's operating expenses. The goal is to recruit numerous new faculty and create the best gastroenterology laboratory in the nation, said Dr. Steve Goldschmid, a gastroenterologist specializing in the endoscopic treatment of gastrointestinal disorders.
Goldschmid is the medical director of the facility and came to Tucson in September from Emory University in Atlanta.
Goldschmid said he also believes the current facility is inadequate in terms of size.
"If you look around this place, you would see there isn't much room, it's old, and it isn't exactly the kind of place that would attract the best people in the country," Goldschmid said. "The new facility is a long-awaited, state-of-the art facility that will enable (us) to perform procedures in a timely manner, which hasn't been the case."
Also, under the current system, the record keeping is not in the shape that it should be, he said.
"Now there is a chart that goes to medical records, and if you want the records (of a patient), you call down for someone to find the chart," he said. "If it is not there, they have to figure out where it is. If it is there, you hope that your piece of paper made it into it."
The voice recognition dictation system can help save time as well as keep the records available in the system. The doctors can access the data through a computer terminal without needing the patient's chart in paper-form.
Endoscopy has reformed medicine since it was founded 30 years ago, Moldow said.
Endoscopy is performed with an endoscope, a flexible scope that is put into a patient's gastrointestinal track - from the esophagus to the rectum - and allows doctors to assess any disorder in that part of the body.
Through endoscopy, patients can avoid costly surgeries, and in many cases , pre-cancerous lesions found in colon can be removed, Moldow said.
However, endoscopy does not allow complete examination of the small intestine, only the first three parts of it, he added. The colon can be five feet long, and the small intestine is 20 feet long.
Aside from diagnosing patients, endoscopy helps identify mummies from thousands of years ago.
When Goldschmid was at Emory University, he performed endoscopy on a 3,000-year-old mummified Egyptian to find out if the mummy was Lady Tahat, the singer in the Amun Temple at Karnak. After hours of examination through the mummy's organs, Goldschmid not only found out that the mummy was Lady Tahat, but also found heart, liver, vessels and a piece of brain left inside the body.
"3000-year-old organs looked very bizarre when you sit around that long," he said.
Goldschmid will appear in cable's The Learning Channel's mummy series "Unwrapped: The Mysterious World of Mummies," in an episode showing how mummies are used in the understanding of ancient and modern science.
Ayse Guner can be reached at ayse.guner@wildcat.arizona.edu.
