Slashdot Mirror
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."
This sounds more like science fiction than anything else to me. But if it works and the technique becomes viable to handle patient with heavy injurie - and assuming the patients can be kept suspended for long periods of time without creating further damages, I wonder if the technique could be adapted for space travel. It would solve a lot of problems related to long-duration interplanetary travel.
The idea is not new. I just wonder if this could be the first step in this direction.
This idea is very old, so I suppose there was a technical hurdle to overcome. What is the new development that makes this now possible? The product used is cold saline, so it can't be that.
What's the new technique, process, idea?
I have to wonder why this hasn't been done sooner. We've known of the benefits of cooling the body before surgery, as outlined in the article. In fact, I'm pretty sure we've been doing it since the 50s. That being the case, why has it taken so long to get to this point?
"10 gunshot and stabbing victims will take part in the trials"
Jesus, I can already picture a scientist charging around a shopping mall with a revolver and a switch-blade yelling "For science!"
Summation 2
It makes sense that they're doing this in Pittsburgh, as opposed to New York City, Boston, Chicago, or Los Angeles, all jurisdictions with very tough gun control laws, thus precluding the team from having any gunshot victims to test their method on.
Sarcasm aside, it's interesting that they're waiting for gunshot and/or stabbing victims. Wouldn't this technique be applicable to any physical trauma resulting in massive amounts of bleeding that you might need time to repair?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The real(?) key to long-term suspended animation (months, years) would probably involve cooling the body to sub-freezing temperatures.
At that point, you need something to keep the ice-crystals from rupturing cells. In certain antarctic fish they have glycoproteins that do this (I think other hibernating animals use glycol or glycogen).
Until we get nuclear fusion(?) it's clear that spaceflight even just within our solar system is going to require some pretty lengthy journeys. On the other hand, if safe long-term suspended animation is attained, there might be a whole bunch of "future" travelers who might decide to jump (one way of course) years, decades, centuries into the future.
I think there was a science fiction book which talked about the (disastrous) effects such a technology had on society.
"We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction," says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. "So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation."
Are they nuts? That's exactly why they should call it suspended animation! It's awesome!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"Yes, he's alive, and in perfect hibernation."
I seem to recall some horror film plots something like that. Usually it's something along the lines of zombies, but I also seem to recall something along the lines of preserving the lives of those who are supposed to be dead and something bad happening as a result. Combine the two? Uh boy... they are supposed to be dead and when "brought back" are actually spirited by demons or something like that.
I am extremely wary yet curious about the technique. To take a body and remove the blood and store it? I'm okay with doing that to a person officially declared dead especially if it's (1) approved by the living person in advance (2) someone extremely recently dead.
What is it about blood which causes problems which are solved by removing it? What's more, with all that capilary action, how can they be sure they removed it all?
You're new here, aren't you.
I had something similar done about 10 years ago. It was a bit experimental at the time and they told me I was very probably going to die during surgery and if I did not die I would prob. have brain damage and/or organ failure but without the surgery I would be dead in hours. They cooled down my body and then removed all my blood, there was no saline replacement. I was dead for about 10 minutes and apart from some problems reanimating me it worked out OK (there were some problems,I spent a month afterwards in a medically induced coma and had to have further work done repairing some damage caused during surgery). It was considered a major success at the time.
A bit scary to be told that you have about 30 minutes to live. Last thing I remember is the anesthetist putting a line in and thinking that once he injected the anesthetic I was going to die.
The fly is in the ointment.
Is it April Fool's day right now on /. ?
Leader's haircut, suspended life, ... what's next ?
How do you suppose they advertise this? "Need subjects for really cool study! $10s and all the ice cubes you can eat! Must have own gun/knife."
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
There are good reasons for refusing such treatments: they may very well leave you with serious brain damage, i.e., a "zombie". Even for resuscitation after regular heart attack, brain damage is so common that some people would rather be dead than take the risk. I probably would rather die than take the risk, but unfortunately there is no way to get paramedics to honor such a request reliably.
According to TFA, he is called Rhee (at the University of Arizona in Tucson), not Rheeat.
"10 gunshot and stabbing victims will take part in the trials."
There's a double-blind trial I'm glad I didn't sign up for.
I have to point out the fact that the human population really doesn't need more medical breakthroughs that continue to lower the death toll. Let people die!
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds has this tech. The author points out in the afterword that this actually one of the few things that might be reality even today - apparently it's now starting to appear more widely...
Anyway, sounds good, I wonder how far the preservation could continue. The old cryogenics scenarios start to come into mind...
In the end it will also not matter, because when these people reach the distant location, there will be no compatible civilization on earth left. There is no point in deep space travel as long as we are not able to go faster than light or at least close to light speed.
The long-lived Howard Families of Heinlein's "Methuselah's Children" (1941) weren't looking for a way back, they were looking for a way out --- having abandoned all hope of finding a safe refuge within the Solar System.
The historical parallels are many.
In many ways, the experience is universal.
In my family history, I see refugees from the religious wars that began with the Reformation, others driven into exile by the Scottish Clearances, the Irish Potato Famine...
Thanks for the link. It's not exactly obvious where and how to opt out of such things.
When the ship's computer wakes you early to report a strange distress signal from an previously uncharted star system - reset the navigation towards earth and go back to suspended animation.
[Insert pithy quote here]
How are they going to get consent? And are they only going to only do this for the otherwise hopeless cases?
The logistics sound impossible. They are going to need a lot or equipment, including a huge tank to store the cold saline solution and another for the blood. They cannot send this out with every ambulance.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It would be a hell of a lot easier. Suck it out, chill it with a small cooler, and pump it right back in. Put a funnel under the wounds and just pump whatever leaks out back in.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
who read his name as "Reheat" the first time around? :)
Aren't the people who get brought in for these types of injuries typically gang bangers and drug related? So if successful, they are freezing people who can't make it in our world and pushing them into the future where they will never be able to make it socially. LOL!
In which the victim's are cut and hacked until almost dead ... then suspended ... repaired ... and the fun begins again.
Combine this with the seriously chilling 'time dilation' drug and the future just seems a little darker.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
This tech sounds similar to what they do in the Vorkosigan series. Sick or severely injured people have all their blood dumped/flushed with a cryo fluid and then are held until they are operated on or cured in the future of whatever disease ailed them.
Or they were supposed to be. Cryoburn goes into the implications in some detail. The protagonist gets carted out in a cryo coffin several times (and lost once).
The author really nailed it with this article though.
Sam
Depends upon your definition of "qualified"
There would be millions of volunteers. If you need a thousand, you could pick the top 0.1%.
Well, we all know that the telephone sanitizers are the first to board...
That just depends on how much the hospital can bill the family, and if the family will pay. If the family says they can have the money in about a week, then "surprise" the patient comes out of suspended animation in about a week, somewhat like how mentally ill patients are released as "successfully treated" as soon as insurance runs out. If the family doesn't have enough income, assets or insurance to even settle for 10% of the bill, then "sorry for your loss, little Johnny is clinically dead."
An example of a racist would be someone who implies that all Muslims/Arabs are a single race and calls people racists for saying derogatory things about them.
Calling someone a "darkie" is a racial slur but is not precise about a race it is referring to.
You can have you spick darkies, your nigger darkies, your sand nigger darkies, even your chink darkies.
Now... How about calling someone who bunches all those people as "darkies" a racist, for "saying derogatory things about them"?
Is that racist too?
See how that goes? A racist does not have to be precise about their derogatory terms and actions to be racist.
They can even be extra nice to the people in question and still be racist.
That's because racism and racist slurs all in the intent of the user - not the person it is aimed at OR the third party observer.
Which is why it is perfectly normal for the most of the world to call all those people with black skin simply blacks without being racist.
Instead of coming up with a PC term involving Africa and a local national distinction.
Imagine the faux pas a Frenchman would commit for calling a Jamaican blackman a "French African". Oh boy!
Ah! But should he call him an "African" implying that "they are all alike" and more - that's racism and the person doing that is a racist.
And more importantly - a FUCKING RETARDED ASSHOLE.
So you see... it does not really matter how we call that person who goes around "saying derogatory things about them" - as long that term is synonymous with being a FUCKING RETARDED ASSHOLE.
Racist, nationalist, fascist, ethnicist, religionist... it's all the same.
And it's OK. Really. It is!
There is no moral or political issue with calling someone who is a FUCKING RETARDED ASSHOLE a FUCKING RETARDED ASSHOLE.
Regardless of their persuasion and the brand of their retardedness.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Uhh no. When it's a life or death situation the goal is to keep the patient alive. No doctors want a patient to die on their watch; it doesn't look good. Also, if you did research you'd know a person can only be held in a suspended state for a few hours.