Slashdot Mirror
French Doctors to Perform Zero-Gravity Surgery
STFS writes "NewScientistSpace has a story about a team of French doctors who will attempt the worlds first zero-gravity operation on a human aboard an Airbus A300 dubbed "Zero-G". The patient, according to forbes.com, was chosen because of his experience with 'dramatic gravitational shifts' as an avid bungee-jumper. The operation will serve as a test for performing surgery in space."
run on linux with broadband included?
... I predict some serious mishaps for all involved. The Vomit Comet is a NASA plane which they use to simulate 0G conditions by the simple expedient of taking the plane up really high and then flying it towards the ground, then pulling up and repeating. As I recall the cycle between weightless and "really freaking heavy" takes about 60 seconds, with about half of that time being weightless. Any more and the plane ends up as NASA's 453rd "premature interface of craft and planet". So the surgery would be stopping and starting constantly, and as most surgeries aren't five-minute affairs I can imagine that would be a little irksome.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I bungy-jumped a couple of weeks ago and can't remember experiencing any dramatic changes in gravity. It was pulling me towards the ground for the entire jump.
Now instead of worrying about leaving the tools inside the person, they have to worry about the tools floating into the person.
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
I sure hope it isn't a vasectomy.
Sending crops to outer space has made them bigger/more powerful ... is this bungee jumper going to turn into superman after the surgery? Let's wait and see ...
Cogito, ergo sum, fosho!
Well, the flight will be aided because the design by an elevator manufacturer is sure to give every one a lift!
Pornography is ahead of the curve on technology use.
If this plane is the same as what we Americans call the Vomit Comet, this surgery is soon to be followed by the first malpractice lawsuit in zero-gravity.
From the TFA: "The European space plane, a specially-adapted Airbus A300 operated out of Bordeaux, flies in a series of roller-coaster like parabolas, creating between 20 and 22 seconds of weightlessness at the top of the curve, a process repeated around 30 times for a 3-hour flight.
As well as the challenge of working in zero gravity, the surgical team will have to halt their work each time the plane pulls out and gravity resumes."
22 seconds multiplied by 30 is 660 seconds, that is only 11 minutes of surgery for 3 hours. I wonder if that tumor could be removed during this 3 hour session.
(I'm getting dizzy already, I'm not a rollercoaster type of person)
I am a doctor, and this is the worst type of medicine: publicity medicine. The goal is to get on the news rather than patient care. If these guys really wanted to experiment (and it is an experiment) with low-gravity surgery they would be doing it on animals long before human trials. With surgery, there are so many complications that cannot be predicted. Who knows how low-gravity affects clotting? Perhaps this guy will have a pulmonary embolus and die... there are a million what if's here that be accounted for and it's irresponsible at the least.
And we wonder why medical costs are getting so out of hand. =)
Good news Mr. Brown, we removed the tumor! Followed by, "We're going to have to put you under again because your liver floated away."
It may actually be helpful to certain surgeries that their is no gravity .. I am not a surgeon so I dunno. But it just seems there may be occasions where you may want to reach something and mass keeps falling down over it. Also, more than likely they wont have a cheap way of simulating gravity ..in a centrifuge type situation the "artificial gravity" forces actually vary towards the center if you are standing on it .. this too poses a new situation. It may be less expensive to simply know how to deal with the rare instances where minimally invasive surgery is required. Otherwise the mission itself may not happen cause of prohibitive costs.
I wonder what they will do for the Zero-G counterpart to suction, usually on Earth, gravity holds the blood at the base of the operating platform (usually the back) and they have a suction tube designed to remove the blood that gets in the way.. In Zero-G however, the blood may be flying all around the cabin, how would they contain the blood flying around?
Did anybody else immediately think of that Zero G porn film from a few years ago?
Like I did?
I'll get my coat.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Seriously, we already had to worry about things falling in while the doctor had us splayed open... now we have to worry about things falling out.
Hrmm, 30 seconds to perform a surgery? Oh no, even better.. we're going to tell the guy to hold on for 10 minutes while we gain enough altitude to drop again. Super. Just pony up the extra bucks and pay Bigelow to throw a couple docs and a patient up in one of his balloons.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
From the Article "to bring a wounded person back to Earth for treatment is both risky for them and expensive" It sounds to me like to do surgery on them in space via a robotic interface controlled from earth would be even more risky and even more expensive. Of course, right now they don't have a very good way of getting someone back to earth quickly if they needed to. They don't have enough shuttle launch locations to prevent weather from fouling up a launch, and it could be days before a shuttle would be able to return, like the situation with flying debris that delayed this last shuttle re-entry.
Warning. Your joke has been deemed too sophisticated/intelligent for /. Given your high karma, would you like to:
1) Insert a less complicated insult about the French, perhaps belittling their manliness?
2) Boringly clarify your remark with a link to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line)?
3) EXCITINGLY clarify your remark with a link to Uncyclopedia (http://www.uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line)?
4) Ignore?
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
What is the point of this? Needlessly endangering someone? Is there some great need for surgery in space? Are there aliens civilizations who need surgery?
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Actually a vasectomy wouldn't be a bad choice.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
From TFA:
"...though it would at first be limited to treating simple, accidental injuries."
As opposed to complicated, intentional injuries?
As others have pointed out, performing surgery 30 seconds at a time doesn't make sense and doesn't reflect the reality of being in micro-gravity during the whole operation. Why don't they do this kind of experiments on the ISS ? It was supposed to be a micro-gravity science laboratory. (Or was it a scheme to maintain 15'000 jobs at NASA ? I don't remember).
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
What will the patient be like after returning to gravity?
I seem to remember that in the development of the X-ray a lot of people were treated for depression of the organs, or some such illness, which later turned out to be something that was caused by the machines taking the photographs, and only caused when the photographs were being taken in the first place. Peoples' organs weren't actually in the wrong place, they were being displaced by the heavy equipment, until the equipment went away again...
I can imagine a situation where they do the operation, then land, and find that when the body of the patient settles, the stitches pull out or the organs get twisted around and he has worse problems than he would have had if they'd stayed in a relatively constant gravitational pull.
Let alone the increases and decreases of gravity during the operation. "catch that kidney as it goes past, will you nurse? Oh, nevermind, it will change direction and return to it's rightful place in 5 more seconds..." Wow. It would be like a Monty Python sketch...
Sure, keeping things close to the earth surface might allow for an easy abort in case of some catastrophic failure, but with the trade-off being that you'll have sharp objects in (and near) your body at constantly changing vectors and accelerations, it hardly seems worth the risk.
While I'm sure they have a fancy plan for blood containment (small incisions and tubes for tool insertion), a slip-up at the wrong time could create some interesting situations (like a stream of small, bloody spheres all over the place). Another issue are the various other fluids to contend with, such as stomach acid, anal leakage and urine. Unless they plan to completely block off every hole on the guy (catheter, stomach pump, intibation tubes, ass plug/vacuum, etc...), this could get messy pretty quick.
Aside from that, what ever became of ideas like one of those large rotating room to create pseudo-gravity using constant angular velocity?
8==8 Bones 8==8
Sounds like removal of a "lipoma". (I've had a few of those removed.)
Think of it as "cancer of the fat" - except benign. You get stiff fatty lumps (maybe one, maybe a scattering, maybe like a bunch of grapes). They're like regular fat with some kind of other tissue in them that makes them hard.
It's really annoying if it's above a muscle or some other easily hurt tissue: It's like a rock embedded in the fat that is SUPPOSED to be cushioning the tissue, so lying on it bruises the tissue instead.
They never go malignant so doctors will leave them in unless they're bruising something underneath or causing a disfiguring bump. They're near the surface of the skin so they're easy to cut out - usually by a dermatologist.
Sounds like the perfect test operation. Not a big deal if they don't get it all, near the surface so you don't have to cut through vital stuff or clamp stuff out of the way to get to it, etc. Easy to tell how well the op went. Much less opportunity for screwups than just about any other surgery.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How unethical? How unecessary. If you actually took the time to read the story, you see that the guy is a VOLUNTEER. This type of research, on VOLUNTEERS, is a necessary thing if we are ever going to learn how to perform emergency procedures in microgravity. To compare this to a NAZI death camp is immature, irresponsible, and just plain ignorant.
Sorry, it's still unethical. Doctors are held to a higher standard than other researchers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
And to compare it to Nazi's is stupid.
May I suggest you read more about this story hereExcuse me, but it doesn't matter whether or not the guy volunteered. If there is a risk to his life and there is it is unethical for the doctor to do the surgery in anything but the best possible conditions. Compare it to, say, volunteering to have surgery done at home so as not to take up a hospital bed that someone else could use. The benefit to others is great. The patient has volunteered to be worked on at home, fully knowing the risk of infection. It's still not ethical. The doctor must refuse to perform the operation. I hope these bozos lose their licenses.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If risk to a patient's life is a condition for making a medical procedure 'unethical' as you claim, than we might as well cease all surgeries and stick with asprin and band-aids. Oh wait, they have side effects too.
There is a risk to all surgery and medical treatement, and fortunately the medical community disagrees with your point of view.
It's not like this is rocket surgery or anything.
...they did my sex reassignment surgery (vaginoplasty) for free.
I don't really see the risk. He'll probably be in less danger, as the operation isn't performed in a hospital, so no need to be worried of getting an infection resistant to antibiotics from a hospital strain of bacteria. I think the biggest risk comes from the possibility of a plane crash, but I guess that's what the parachutists are for. The operation is so minor that one can almost perform it on oneself. Maybe it's illegal in the US, or something like that, but I really don't see how it's unethical. I could be wrong, maybe the Hippocrates oath states that "you must not perform operations in suboptimal conditions on willing volunteers", but I suspect not.
There is nothing unethical about performing an experimental procedure on a volunteer. That's how medical knowledge gets advanced. Regardless of the outcome of this procedure, it'll help give insight into how to go about doing it in the future. It will save lives.
I mean... by your standards, we wouldn't have organ transplants, modern surgery, anaesthetics, any of the wonderdrugs we now consider must-haves, antibiotics, and a whole slew of other things that had to be tried on somebody first. How many lives have been saved by, say, penicillin? *somebody* had to be the first guinea pig. You think that was unethical?
Personally, I'd like to know what surgical procedure can be done in the 30s or so they have before gravity "returns". They are doing it with a parabolic flight trajectory, right?
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
All of those technologies were developed on volunteers who had no viable alternative. If a doctor believes a patient has a better chance of recovering/surviving an existing procedure than they do from a new experimental procedure, then it is malpractice to apply the experimental procedure, regardless of whether or not the patient volunteers. This is different in other professions, where researchers are free to seek out volunteers who are willing to do things not in their own best interest, but doctors are held to a higher standard than other researchers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Actually, that's not true for anesthesia
I don't think you've ever participated in medical research or spoken to a real doctor about it. All research goes through a review board, and the primary critereon is that the risks be as minimal as possible and that the subject volunteers be fully informed. No research would ever take place if your standards applied, and all medical progress would halt since even the most benign advances require study in human populations before they are accepted by the medical community.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
A lipoma is benign, however they can undergo malignant transformation - just like any tissue in the body. Generally the small (5 cm and deep to the fascia ( a gristly layer over the muscle) tend to malignantly transform and should be excised.
,the bad ones tend to be firmer and look funny on MRI.
Dermatologist generally don't do cancer operations - they take out skin lesions a bit at a time untill they hit healthy tissue. If something is deep to the skin - i.e. a lipoma, it should be removed by a surgeon (general, or orthopaedic) that specialises in oncology. The only real way to determine if they are benign is to examine it pathologically. Generally the benign ones tend to be soft,
..........FULL STOP.
A monkey controlled by scientists via a banana-operated helmet, will attempt to swim all the way from Europe to the States in 3 days, with a bag of potatoes in his mouth.
This is done as part of a project to develop self-sufficient monkeys that will deliver groceries for old ladies on the future colonies on the Moon and Mars
-- You must be yay-high to rule the world.
hmmm wonder what turbulence would do to the surgery... "ok we are almost done... just hold still... [SLICE] uhhhh.. really hope he didn't need that... eh.. we'll just tell him we thought he'd like a souveneir."
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Space tourism has gone too far!
--<Mike>--
Given that the there are 30 spots when the operation is done that gives 20s * 30 = 600s = 10mins.
The flight is for 3 hours and even if half of that is taken up in take off and landing (I doubt it) that still leaves 1 hour 20mins where the operation isn't taking place.
My guess is that it is nothing like the Vomit Comit. Sure it will dive at the same acceleration as gravity to simulate weightlessness like the vomit comot, but I'd say that it would level out quite slowly to prevent the large Gs as everybody onboard decelerates. Likewise the climb up to the high altitude each time will also most likely be slow to prevent everybody experiencing large Gs.
...who has to mop the ceiling afterward...
What a post! "final???" Get lost, man!
http://www.nauck.eu/
Maybe I missed it, but what is the (supposed) benefit of operating in ZeroG?
it's the sudden G-Force applied to the Dr.'s scaple at an inopportune moment.... that occurs several times an hour.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
We have reached a point where if you have bungee-jumped at some point in your life, the govmint (or some evil agency)has a right to take you on Zero-G surgery tests, where they have your belly open and your intestines floating around 30000 feet above America. I know it's stupid to bungee-jump but isn't this too much? What next, you Ministry-of-Truthians?
;)
What? I didn't RTFA you say? But that means nothing, only perhaps that you are new here
Should this experiment made by the NASA, in a Boeing with U.S. doctors, half the comments I saw in /. would have been reversed.
So, about recent french envolvement:
The first time, it was to say George Bush Jr was an incompetent a**hole.
The second, it was to say seomthing was terribly wrong with global climate changes.
The third, it was to say there were no WMD in Irak.
The last, it was to say the Irak invasion would only increase terrorism.
Note that these are news only in the U.S.A.. Everybody else on this planet knew about these facts since *years*.
It's funny to see how far someone who was wrong will go, to try to ridiculize the one who was right. But it's funnier when the people who get f*cked by the first, will go along the joke and, despite having a d*ck deep up their a**es, insult the second.
When will some U.S. people get a brain, and accept their own mistakes, instead of diverting the blame to others ?
Innovation don't always come from hamburger eating arrogant fat red necks who somehow ate back their own vomit and ended believing in the crap they were trying to feed the others.
(note: I know this is caricatural... One can find the kind of people everywhere in the world, but these days, they seem to concentrate together... Anyway, I did not invent the whole freedom fries fashion...)
Humility is not humiliation. Please try to practice the first, it will help you avoid you to bear the second.
Y'know... bedrest, fluids, and aspirin make a perfectly viable alternative for most viral and bacterial infections. An otherwise healthy adult has an incredibly powerful immune response to most of the bugs that can get you sick. Come to it... grinning and bearing the pain of, say, childbirth or a broken leg is a perfectly viable alternative. Humans were doing it for millenia. But somebody, sometime, had to be the guinea pig who discovered that hemlock will kill you. And somebody, sometime, had to be the one that they first tried aspirin on. At some point in history, those were experimental treatments.
And before you go off on some tangent about how that was hundreds, or thousands of years ago, I'll point this out to you: Aspirin is a very useful anti-inflammatory. It's been used for a couple hundred years to treat a wide variety of things, including inflammation due to arthritis. I'm currently on Diclofenac Sodium. It's a drug that's been developped in the last 10 years to treat... you guessed it... arthritis. Diclo is being used to treat inflammation, minor to moderate pain, and it's seeing some pretty wide use in sports-related injuries. It's actually a pretty neat little wonderdrug, but less than 10 years ago, it was an experimental new treatment in a time when a perfectly viable alternative existed. Ibeuprophen? Also developped within the last 40 years as an alternative to Aspirin and Acetaminophen. Acetaminophen itself was developped in the last hundred years as... an alternative to Aspirin.
And how about organ transplants? There were ways to perform kidney dialysis before the development of the modern dialysis machine. And Iron Lungs? There are perfectly survivable alternatives to a whole lot of the organ transplants that we are now doing as a matter of routine. They may not give the same quality of life as, say, a new kidney would, but they're certainly viable. But somebody had to take a risk with a patient's life to develop the technique for how to perform those surgeries. It's not like you can look ahead a few pages to see how it turns out: these now routine surgeries were experimental at some point.
Medical science would most emphatically *not* be where it is today without doctors trying out experimental procedures and drugs when perfectly "viable alternatives" already existed. It may sound incredibly cold and callous to you, but the medical profession is well aware that sometimes you have to lose a patient in order to advance knowledge. As long as you're not maliciously trying something that you know will harm the patient, and as long as there's a reasonable chance of success, it's not unethical to try something new.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
While you're at it, fix this
I think I mispoke slightly - most malignant soft tissue tumors tend to be >5cm and are deep to the fascia. When a lipoma that is >5cm and deep to the fascia is encountered it is reguarded as having a higher chance of being malignant and is recommended to be excised after proper imaging.
Dempsey Springfeild (at Colombbia) has recommended that small subcutaneous lipomas can be followed clinically, a MRI is recommended for the larger ones,that are deep to the fascia - so no we don't do MRIs for little subQ lipomas.
As to who should excise lipomas, I work at a tertiary referral center (large university) and often see patients who thought they have had a "lipoma" removed by a general surgeon, with a transverse incision, and it winds up being some sarcoma with positive margins.
Are you in the medical field too? - I'm a practicing musculoskeletal oncology surgeon.
..........FULL STOP.
Oh great physics nerd at heart, do tell me: What is the force of gravity we feel on Earth? I bet I can guess your answer: 9.8 metres per second squared. Is that all that is acting on us? No, the Sun's gravity is also acting on us. Why isn't it figured in to the force of gravity on Earth? Because Earth is in a constant state of free-fall around the Sun, just like astronauts are when orbiting the Earth. Gravity is a relative force, measure by its perceived force within a frame of reference. If that frame of reference is standing in Helsinki, then it is 9.819 metres per second squared. If it is standing in Djakarta, then it's 9.781 metres per second squared. If the frame of reference is inside of a jet flying downward in a specific way to counteract the forces of gravity, then the perceived force for that frame of reference is 0 metres per second squared.
You need to pull your nose out of your physics book long enough to realize that your constant is a tool for your math. Gravity is not constant.
Freedom is assumed. Then they try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
Speaking of off topic, how can the site you linked be so cool and yet not fix this?
Otherwise up to the usual SD journalism by proxy standards.
Since I'm an AC I can afford to be blunt. SHUT THE FUCK UP. You don't know what you are talking about and you are pissing me off. Experimental procedures and medications are applied all the time to volunteers. Without experimental procedures and medications we would still be giving people a shot of whiskey before sawing off their leg. There are always risks when doing anything new, but there are also risks of sticking with the same old thing for ever. If the guy is willing to put himself at risk to help doctors learn something which could be benificial then what authority do you have to say he can't volunteer. Stop being an ASSHOLE.
/. account anymore. Karma has been twisted and /. has suffered from it.
Signed an AC that doesn't give a crap about karma and so don't use his
I wonder if they will be playing the Blade - Bloodbath song during the operation.
Why don't you change your username to spammerkraut?
(RTFA)
Can we get approval for "off-label" use?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
and the potential threat of global warming, which even George Bush now acknowledges, flying a large plane up and down to create small windows of zero-g to do surgery on a single individual sounds absolutely moronic.
Ya, sure, some interesting scientific insights on surgery in a no-gravity environment can be learned, but when could they actually be used on even a moderate scale? I've heard of no cheap zero-gravity breakthroughs...
This could get messy.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
On Earth, gravity rules. And it plays a zero-sum game. Which means any time you spend at zero-G you spend a proportional amount of time 1/T at "T" G. So assuming this Euro "vomit comet" does 20 second weightless parabolas, there's immediately afterwards 20 seconds of TWO G, or fourty seconds of 1.5 G, or so on.
.1 gravity rotatinal space station plan in order to make regular surgery, with liquids that don't float around, than to perfect zero-G surgery, in 20-second snatches.
Err... No.
You mistook the Star Wars laws of physics with ours (or even Star Trek's).
The 1G from earth gravity is constant, true.
But the Gs from movement only happens when you are accelerating. Which means that when you do any movement in any direction with a constant speed, then the movement does not produce "Gs". Only when you accelerate (or change direction, which is the same thing) you do feel the "Gs".
The "fall part" means the plane lets itself fall, accelerating toward earth with an acceleration of 1G, which means that everything within will appear to be "weightless", because everything will fall at the same acceleration (and speed).
The "up part" does not need acceleration, for the most part : You only need to go up at constant speed, with mean the only acceleration you will feel will be the Earth's. So you will feel 1G only.
Your arguments are still valid: The plane occupants will probably feel the Gs when the plane goes up because the plane won't settle for a constant increase in altitude, but your "physics" arguments are wrong.
There's unlikely to ever be a need to do surgery in Earth orbit. Any reasonable orbiting craft will have a "down to Earth" capsule.
It could take hours for the occupant of your miraculous capsule to reach a decent hospital. That is, if the occupant is not so wounded he could well die from the shock. Now, in the ISS, or even in the 6 months length travel from earth to mars, you could be heavily wounded and in need of heavy and urgent surgery.
It's probably easier to dream up a
Strange the NASA, ESA and every other space agency on this planet did not think about your solution...
Real surgery usually requires full anesthesia, which is hard enough to manage on Earth. Imagine trying to keep the patient from retching, vomiting, coughing, and keeping their airways clear of glop! I'd hate to have that job!
You're probably right. It's why those tests are interesting, to learn the pros and cons of the methodology. Despite the ideas of some naive people, the ESA did not succeed soo much Ariane launches by paying for expensive and useless experiments. They know better than that.
In space, no-one can hear you scream.
for great justice
Once the plane has done its zero-g fall, it has accelerated downwards at 9.8 m/s for a number of seconds. If it's a 20-second parabola, the plane will be going down at close to 200 m/s, that's almost 600 ft/sec. Real basic physics.
Now please explain how that plane is going to regain level flight without accelerating upwards? At 600 ft/sec down, yo don't have a whole lot of time to pull up. There's going to be significant G's pulled.
Again, your failure to study history betrays you. Antibiotics were discovered by Alexander Fleming, a doctor, who tested the drug on himself to ensure that it was harmless before giving it to patients because he was restricted by ethics from testing it on volunteers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
That's safety, not efectiveness.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
"Dave, you do want your liver back, don't you Dave?"
Table-ized A.I.
So let me get this straight. You're saying that it wasn't the final post at the time it was posted? Talk to the hand cuz the face ain't listenin'! ps: final post!!!!!!!!1