Commentary: Droopy kidneys and floppy airways: Keeping taut standards with surgical innovation

Abstract

In the early 1900s, patients with abdominal pain began to be diagnosed with a condition known as nephroptosis.1 Before long, nearly 170 operations had been devised to reposition and stabilize the “movable kidney.” However, within a span of about 30 years, surgical procedures to fix nephroptosis peaked and then disappeared. Surgical history is littered with such operations with plausible anatomic rationale but lack of efficacy because the purported causal mechanism suffered from various logical fallacies (Figure 1).