Gunshot Victims To Be Part of "Suspended Animation" Trials

New submitter Budgreen writes: "Knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month. The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. 'If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed,' says surgeon Peter Rheeat from the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique. 10 gunshot and stabbing victims will take part in the trials."

Comments

Re:UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh

[heypete]

My question is this voluntary? How is exactly does one opt out if they prefer traditional care? Doesn't seem to be like a recent victim of gross trauma, can exactly make an informed decision.

According to the article at New Scientist:

Getting this technique into hospitals hasn't been easy. Because the trial will happen during a medical emergency, neither the patient nor their family can give consent. The trial can only go ahead because the US Food and Drug Administration considers it to be exempt from informed consent. That's because it will involve people whose injuries are likely to be fatal and there is no alternative treatment. The team had to have discussions with groups in the community and place adverts in newspapers describing the trial. People can opt out online. So far, nobody has.

Re:"Victims"

[bdeclerc]

You do realise that "Muslim" is not a race, right?

Re:Space travel

[MancunianMaskMan]

Richard Branson, is that you?

No, surely it's Dr Strangelove: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...

Re:"Victims"

[stoploss]

Try carrying a kitchen knife in your pocket sometime and pulling it out in such a way that results in your doing more damage to someone else than to yourself.

...if only someone could invent some sort of "wrapper" for the blade that would allow a fixed blade to be carried safely and drawn out when desired without inflicting injury on the user. Maybe they could call it a "knife condom", or maybe a "knife carrier", or maybe they would invent a completely new word for it like "sheath".

They could even make universal sheaths that support different types of knives, so that the sheath could be used for a knife that wasn't specifically designed for it.

Oh well.

You may be correct that kitchen knives are used mostly in crimes of passion, but don't underestimate the violence inherent in criminals. For example, once the UK finished effectively banning firearms, they were saddened to find that criminals switched to knives instead. What was their reaction? Knife control laws. Obviously, once those laws were in place, it made kitchen knives more popular for use in crime, so their natural reaction was to start calling for a ban on kitchen knives.

Since they are attempting to treat the symptom rather than the cause, I look forward to a future where the UK calls for a succession of such laws: kitchen knife control, steel pipe control, brick control, rock control, and, ultimately, stick control.

Re:"Victims"

[Kielistic]

There's no hard definition of species either but I assure you that I am not a cabbage. In the world of biological sciences: "close enough to be useful" is sometimes the best you're going to get.