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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."
... 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.
I sure hope it isn't a vasectomy.
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."
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.
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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.
With a continuously occupied space facility, private ventures planning to establish "space hotels", and with plans (mentioned in TFA) to establish a permanently inhabited moon base in the next few decades, possibly followed by manned missions to Mars which will take a very long time in transit, yes, there is a reasonably predictable, not too distant future need to have techniques available to perform surgeries in low and zero gravity.
Conducting a fairly low risk surgery under conditions where return to gravity and to earthbound facilities in reasonable time are not impractical seems to me a reasonable way to approach the development of such techniques. Of course, there is always a risk associated with such experimentation. which is why you have informed consent of a volunteer subject.
And to compare it to Nazi's is stupid.
May I suggest you read more about this story hereIt's not like this is rocket surgery or anything.
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.
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.
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