Total gastrectomy: twenty years' experience

The management and treatment of patients with gastric cancer is all encompassing. It includes preoperative care, operative resection postoperative sympathetic encouragement with therapeutic and nutritional guidance. This has been the experience with 62 human beings afflicted with malignant disease of the stomach. The end result has been that approximately 50% of these patients survived five years or more. This is a comparative favorable percentage when considering cancer elsewhere in the gastrointestinal tract. What is more enlightening is that the patients were comfortable and able to enjoy a pleasant personal diet during the five or more years following surgery. This salubrious state is attributed to the preservation of a small segment of stomach which enabled the intrinsic factor in the gastric mucosa to participate in and contribute to the normal hemopoietic physiological process.