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by unityByFreedom 2524 days ago
This is an incredible story. His mom had the same undiagnosed, unfixable problem. The gist is,

> If he could cut out the medullas of his adrenal glands -- sort of like slicing into a hard-boiled egg and removing the yolk -- his health would improve.

> Eventually he recruited a surgeon from the University of Alabama-Birmingham. In September 2010 Lindsday went to the university hospital, where the doctor successfully extracted one of his adrenal medullas.

> Three weeks after the procedure, Lindsay could sit upright for three hours. By Christmas Eve, he had the strength to walk a mile to church.

> But progress was slow. In 2012, he underwent a second surgery at Washington University in St. Louis to remove the medulla from his remaining adrenal gland.

> A year later, he was well enough to fly with friends to the Bahamas. It was the first time in his life the Midwesterner had seen the ocean.

1 comments

I understand the urge to summarize, but maybe interested HN users can be expected to read the article before coming to the comments? This seriously degrades the quality of discussion.
It's fine to bemoan people commenting who haven't read the article, but reading the comments first to gauge if the article is clickbait/whatever is a perfectly valid use-case.

I also cherish summaries like these - if I read the whole article I won't remember more than 2 sentences of it tomorrow. That distillation process is inevitable and good. It's a service to do it well for those who are time/memory-limited.

Thanks! At the time I wrote this, the majority of comments were focused on criticizing the headline [1], and there was little discussion of the article itself.

Now I see there are many comments about the content of the article. I don't know if the summary caused more people to read it or not. I wanted to encourage more readership and on-topic discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20541644

I am often more interested in the comments here than the content of the article so I am happy with the summary.

I can often understand what the article is about and go to the comment section for pros and cons

For reading, maybe, but it's a lot harder to contribute something meaningful if you don't know the context to start with.
There is a popular trend where people will read the comments first and depending on the discussion they move to read the article
I’d call it a tactic, not a trend. It’s been around since the advent of halfway decent comment sections.