While many prostheses are designed to restore appearance, some also serve a practical purpose.<\/p>\n
Artificial fingers and thumbs, for example, can help patients feel more confident in social settings while addressing some of the challenges associated with missing digits.<\/p>\n
Bigmore said he has seen an increase in patients coming to him with head and neck cancer, with patients having their whole nose removed or their eye taken out.<\/p>\n
He said these patients “are literally afraid to look in the mirror anymore”.<\/p>\n
“They just see something different than was there before,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Not only are they dealing with that cancer and the prognosis of the cancer, the long-term outlook, but they’re also dealing with the fact that they’re now different and relationships are different.<\/p>\n
“They don’t want to face the world anymore, they just want to hide.<\/p>\n
“In fact, a lot of my patients would say that they would rather be dead than actually look the way they now look.<\/p>\n
“And for me, that’s a big moment because I try my best to make sure that they want to live, they want to keep going.”<\/p>\n
He said after the prosthetic is fitted he hopes they regain their confidence.<\/p>\n
“Life’s never going to be the same, but it doesn’t have to be over,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While many prostheses are designed to restore appearance, some also serve a practical purpose. Artificial fingers and thumbs,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":801974,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-801973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801973\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/801974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}