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Eur J Cardiothorac Surg 2006;30:688
© 2006 Elsevier Science NL

Letters to the Editor

Reply to Schier

Department of Pediatric Surgery, University Children's Hospital, P.O. Box, CH 4005 Basel, Switzerland

Received 4 July 2006; accepted 5 July 2006.

^_* Corresponding author. Tel.: +41 61 6855239; fax: +41 61 6855011. (Email: frankmartin.haecker{at}ukbb.ch).

Key Words: Child • Vacuum bell • Pectus excavatum

We apologise for not having cited the article by Schier et al. [1] in our publication [2]. We regret this error which happened owing to the fact that Dr Haecker did the literature search for our article before publication of the above mentioned paper [1]. We are sorry for this. However, we obtained written permission by Dr Bahr to use his CT-scans showing the vacuum bell applied in a patient suffering from pectus excavatum. We stated in the legend to these figures that these pictures were provided by Dr Bahr (p. 558). To the best of our knowledge, Dr Bahr was also noted at the homepage of Mr Klobe (www.trichterbrust.de) to be the author of these pictures and Dr Bahr declared again that he was the owner of these pictures. We regret that Professor Schier was not informed that his co-author Mr Klobe read our manuscript before submission. We offered the co-authorship of our article to Mr Klobe but he refused to be cited as a co-author in any medical paper due to the fact that he is a technical engineer. However, we mentioned his name (p. 559) and his homepage in our article [2] ¹ where interested readers can obtain further information regarding his construct. We stated in our article that Dr Bahr and Professor Schier did the initial tests to investigate the use of vacuum chest wall lifter children suffering from pectus excavatum (p. 558). It was the aim of our study to evaluate our first experience using the vacuum bell use in our setting. We did not state that we were the first to use this old method as we are aware that this treatment modality has been described several decades ago, and we mentioned this fact in our article. This fact was also described at the homepage of Mr Klobe. Finally, we do not fully understand why Professor Schier states in his letter: ‘We do not want this to continue...’ as our article was published with the knowledge of both of his co-authors.

Footnotes

¹ www.trichterbrust.de.

References

1. Schier F, Bahr M, Klobe E. The vacuum chest wall lifter: an innovative, nonsurgical addition to the management of pectus excavatum. J Pediatr Surg 2005;40:496-500.[CrossRef][Medline]
2. Haecker FM, Mayr J. The vacuum bell for treatment of pectus excavatum: an alternative to surgical correction?. Eur J Cardiothorac Surg 2006;29(4):557-561.[Abstract/Free Full Text]

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Personal Folders Download to citation manager Permission Requests Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Haecker, F.-M. Articles by Mayr, J. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Haecker, F.-M. Articles by Mayr, J. Related Collections Chest wall