It’s a relatively well known practice for Walt Disney World to market its conference facilities to medical training companies as the ideal place to hold medical training seminars. The doctors get to keep their required levels of training up and they get to bring their families to Walt Disney World to enjoy a break at the happiest place on Earth. The training companies get the prestige of the Disney name on their brochure. It’s a win-win situation.
If you’re like me you probably are picturing endless hours of powerpoint slides, lectures, reviewing the latest studies in medical journals. And that’s certainly true for the majority of the classroom settings. But sometimes Doctors need more than a slide presentation? Sometimes Doctors need a cadaver, aka the body of a dead human, to practice upon.
The presence of so-called cadaver labs at Florida resorts, including the Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Resort convention center, is the subject of a special report by Reuters. Reporters from the organization were able to attend a training session where doctors practiced nerve root blocks and other procedures on cadavers in one of the Grand Harbor ballroom salons at the Yacht & Beach Club convention center.
I’m pretty sure I ate lunch in one of those salons recently. It’s disgusting to think that dead bodies may have been in that room previous to me, or any other group that held their meetings there.
The article lists a number of potential health problems if guests were to be exposed to bodily fluids of an infected cadaver. But they also point out that the procedures of using dead bodies for science is generally thought to be safe and there have been no reports of infection.
The whole article is fascinating, including the photo of cadavers in a Yacht club conference room. Disney refused to comment for the article