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Joining Blood Vessels Without Sutures
Med-trump writes "Stanford microsurgeons have used a poloxamer gel and bioadhesive, rather than a needle and thread, to join together blood vessels. The technique, published in the recent issue of Nature Medicine, may replace the 100-year-old method of reconnecting severed blood vessels with sutures. According to the authors of the study, 'ultimately, this has the potential to improve patient care by decreasing amputations, strokes and heart attacks while reducing health-care costs.'"
So instead of having chemicals filtering into our bodies where they do incredible harm, we're to have these chemical 'glues' used directly inside our blood vessels where they can spread through to virtually every cell of our bodies?
"Better Living Through Chemistry" indeed. No thank you.
The facts are undeniable: since the advent of man-made chemicals, we have gotten less healthy as a species. Cancers, heart disease, subluxation, nerve damage, autism, allergies... the list is endless. As a sad example, take Steve Jobs. The man is a legend and has been a vegetarian/vegan for decades. How could someone with the healthiest diet known end up with cancer? Chemicals. While he ate what he thought was a good diet, I'll wager he ate non-organic foods. They're loaded with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and other "cancer-cides".
If I or any members of my family ever have to go under the knife (unlikely as we're all healthy, but imagine an accident) I would *insist* that they use what they've used for years: natural catgut sutures.
The best solution is to avoid the surgeon's butcher knives and the BigPharma-controlled Sickness Industry:
- Get plenty of rest
- Get plenty of exercise
- Eat a vegetarian (preferably vegan) organic diet
- Get regular chiropractic adjustments to help maintain nervous system health.
Take care,
Bob.
Chiropractic Saves Lives!
Another human invention that's been around since the dawn of time!
"ultimately, this has the potential to improve patient care by decreasing amputations, strokes and heart attacks while reducing health-care costs"... For the insurance companies. What are the odds those savings will be passed on to the patients?
This isn't exactly super-new - it's expanding the scope of an existing technique to cases where it hasn't been used before.
Using glue instead of sutures has been around for at least a decade - after getting hit in the face with a hockey pick around 1999-2000, instead of stitches the local hospital glued together the gash above my eye where the lens from my glasses pushed in. (Thank God for shatterproof polycarbonate lenses - the lens saved my eye.) The glue worked very well - not even the slightest scar remains there.
However this appears to involve applying glue with far more precision than anything done before.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
According to TFA a major part of this is the use of a polymer that solidifies when heated but dissolves when it cools down. It is striking that we can not only have such weird substances but can have such substances that are also reasonably ok inside humans (that is, not poisonous and not triggering an immune response). The main advantages of this method is that it is faster than the normal method and that it can be applied to much smaller blood vessels. According to TFA, suturing is extremely difficult if not outright impossible for blood vessels that are smaller than 1 milimeter wide. The basic type of polymer has been used in various forms before to deliver drugs, so while this version is a modified version, it is unlikely that any very serious problems will crop up. Overall, this will be helpful in for both planned and emergency surgeries and should help reattach limbs and digits much more effectively. Right now when a finger is removed reattachment is a difficult process that often just fails. This should change that.
For those who didn't read the link, the problem is, "How do you glue the ends of a tiny blood vessel together without gluing the lumen of the vessel shut?" Answer is that you need a temporary plug that sits inside and joins the two ends together, while propping it open until the glue sets.
The clever part was finding a material (the polaxamer) that is solid enough to do the job, but melts away at the right speed afterwards, without toxicity.
How long until they can suture a wound above the spinal cord with can'd foam.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
"How do you glue the ends of a tiny blood vessel together without gluing the lumen of the vessel shut?" Answer is that you need a temporary plug that sits inside and joins the two ends together, while propping it open until the glue sets.
Also, a lot of people don't know that surgeons have been gluing (larger) blood vessels together, instead of suturing with needle and thread for decades already. Cyanoacrylates (superglues) were used outside the USA in medical applications since the 1970's, and specifically, butyl cyanoacrylate was approved in 1998 by the FDA here in the US.
"Oh, I'd give a lot to see the hospital. Probably...needles and...sutures. All the pain. They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures...all the terrible pain!"
-McCoy, City on the Edge of Forever
ITYM "reduce heath care costs once the patent expires". Time and again, a breakthrough at a tax-supported university that's supposed to improve healthcare for all mankind becomes a privately-held patent that is used to gouge those who can afford it. Considering Stanford is a private school which accepts very little money from public sources and only for specific projects, there's even less reason for the public to even expect this will be freely available technology.
I think it is so awesome to have some innovative way of doing things that is less intrusive to the body, and gives the same results....