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Air Force Treating Wounds With Lasers and Nanotech
An anonymous reader passes along a piece up on Wired's Danger Room about advanced medical tech that's being used in the military, but is not available generally due to the lack of FDA approval. "Forget stitches and old-school sutures. The Air Force is funding scientists who are using nanotechnology and lasers to seal up wounds at a molecular level. It might sound like Star Trek tech, but it's actually the latest in a series of ambitious Pentagon efforts to create faster, more effective methods of treating war-zone injuries. ... Instead of being sealed up with a needle and thread, a patient's wound would be coated in a dye, then exposed to green light for 2-3 minutes. The dye absorbs the light and catalyzes molecular bonds between the tissue's collagen. The bonds instantly create a seal that's watertight, which prevents inflammation or risk of infection, and speeds up the formation of scar tissue."
Sounds like a fancy-scmancy version of Quikclot, the powder you can pour on a wound to form an instant clot.
Not only is it widely used, you can buy it for your own first aid kit from Amazon and others.
Superglue is too fast now?
Before there are rants on the unapproved use of medical procedures on the troops, as suggested by the summary, read the article. It states they are only doing clinical trials, and mention the difficulty in getting FDA approval.
Superficial wounds in a shit environment will cause infection quickly, and remove soldiers from battle. Not to mention, this seems a little more elegant than glue. Glue works for some stuff...
Excellent, because I'm not able to play Crysis WITH a computer.
now where is my anti-aging pill?
There is no anti-aging pill (except maybe more Vitamin D than you're probably getting).
There is, though, an aging pill. It's called a "donut."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Given that explosives can toss thousands of fragments capable of causing modest surface lacerations a fair distance beyond the "instant death/horrible injury" radius, it probably isn't at all uncommon to have situations with a dozen or two casualties per explosion, some hundreds in the course of a bombardment, all with somewhere between "multiple" and "numerous" surface wounds. All of which need to be closed before they get infected, or start collecting sand and bugs, and so forth, but during which time the cream of the medical personnel, and their support staff, are busy trying to stabilize the seriously injured.
If you can, with the right technology, make it so that anybody who can handle a syringe full of glue, basic aseptic technique, and a flashlight can swiftly close superficial wounds, you can probably reduce the mean-time-to-treatment for the lightly to moderately wounded, reduce the number of gross, scar-tastic rushed suture jobs, and preserve the time and attention of the most skilled medics for the more serious injuries.
Assuming the light source can be shrunk and hardened(which given the impressive performance of modern solid state lighting and diode lasers is a definite possibility), you could probably get the whole system down to something that consists of a funny looking flashlight and some disposable tubes of glue, suitable for forward operating use by anybody who has had cursory training...
Cauterization uses the direct application of heat to seal wounds. The heat can be applied in a number of ways, including lasers, an electric current, or just a very hot piece of metal. This, however, is not a technique to destroy tissue but rather to glue it back together. The active principle is a light-sensitive dye called Rose Bengal that is applied to the wound. When Rose Bengal absorbs light with a wavelength of around 560nm, it enters an excited state which ends up transferring energy to surrounding molecules, which in the case of a wound, would primarily be collagen protein. The transferred energy generates free radical species that cause the collagen molecules to bind to each other, sealing the wound. So there isn't much heating of the wound; the laser is present to activate the Rose Bengal, not cook the tissue.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
except maybe more Vitamin D than you're probably getting
Recently discovered this myself.
Had some lab work done not too long ago... Turns out I've got almost no Vitamin D in me. "trace amounts" is what the Doctor said. He was horrified and put me on some supplements pretty quickly. Told me to get outside in the sun, eat better, etc.
I had no idea just how many horrible things can happen when you're low on Vitamin D.
And, according to my doctor, just about everyone is deficient to one degree or another. And it's especially bad around here in the winter (less sunlight and people don't like to go out in the cold).
Amazing.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Yup. Remember that an injured soldier typically takes three soldiers to remove him/her, whereas a dead soldier takes one. Injured soldiers are a real drain on tactical effectiveness, unless one accepts the premise that it is best to just let them die or "put them out of their misery" so the mission can continue with the least loss of effectiveness. I submit that that may be tactically effective, but (a) unacceptably brutal, and (b) strategically ineffective unless one can sustain a war of attrition.
Rapid treatment not only saves lives (and provides a soldier to live to fight another day), but helps minimize the "expense" of triage and evac.
In Liberty, Rene
The nature of the reactions, despite 'application of energy', is quite different; the energy involved is also on vastly different scales.
Cauterization involves application of heat, burning the tissues (killing the tissues) and denaturating the proteins (completely wrecking their structure), causing them to precipitate out of solution and clump together, plugging things up (plugging up bleeding blood vessels, and also causing blood to clot around the plugs, being a side effect of it). Lots of heat energy, sufficient to burn flesh. Usually done with a fair bit more precision these days of course.
This technique, on the other hand, is quite similar to one which I use from time to time for disinfection of periodontal pockets around teeth... application of a dye (in my case, toluidine blue) which binds to the bacteria, and then activation of the dye with the appropriate frequency of light which is matched to the absorption spectrum of the dye (sorry, not at the office so can't look up the specs), generating free radicals which react with bacterial components and ultimately killing the bacteria. The energy involved is literally that of the photon of the proper wavelength which knocks the electron out of the dye when the dye absorbs it... multiplied many times of course. Without the matched dye to absorb the light though, the light won't be doing a heck of a lot of useful work... sure it'll be absorbed by other molecules, which does heat them up somewhat, but nowhere near the level of heat used in cauterization.
In this situation, the dye is Rose Bengal, which likely has an affinity for collagen. Activation of the dye causes the collagen molecules to form bonds with one another, cross-linking them. Essentially, it turns the existing collagen where it is applied into the 'glue' to hold the wound together. No destruction of living tissue as cautery would (whether tissues die from other factors with the injury, such as insufficient blood supply, are a different story), and also much less of a mess of various byproducts left behind afterwards as well.
-- Silhouette