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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.
"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
Sometimes its small details that make a huge difference and allow old ideas to become reality.
Just think about blood tranfusions. The first attemps to store blood to transfuse it at a later point all failed. A simple stabilisation agent made the procedure possible. I wouldn't expect the New Scientist to produce such details in their publications though.
It would be interesting to see a paper from a medical journal on this topic.
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.
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This idea is very old, so I suppose there was a technical hurdle to overcome.
Probably the replacing-all-their-blood-with-saline-without-them-dying part.
No sig today...
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.
Presby is only a 5 minute drive from places where stabbings and gunshots are common. One of my mom's friends lost her son from a gunshot basically on the doorstep of Presby. There's a handful of other hospitals next door too (Magee, Mercy, Shadyside, etc). Something like this may have saved his life.
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:
Maybe it's a bit trickier to replace every milliliter of blood in your body with cold salty water than to lower someone's body temperature.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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?
It claims it can be done 2 hours after they've died, at that point I think I could replace the corpses blood with marinara sauce without worrying about the health effects.
I may get an informed consent form tattooed on my chest. "Dear Mr/Mrs Doctor Person, If I am pretty much dead, feel free to try your experimental zombie procedures. Signed Iwill EatYourBrain
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.
Is it April Fool's day right now on /. ?
Leader's haircut, suspended life, ... what's next ?
Sometimes it worked, but often the type administered was incompatible, and it took early medical practicioners a bit to sort it out.
Some dying patients were saved during this research period though, and if that same mindset is applied to this it will undoubtedly contribute some new technology.... if it doesn't get litigated out of existence first.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
Judging by the quotation in the summary, we can presumably infer that someone who has been dead for less than two hours is only mostly dead. Interesting....
"The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution [...] At this point they will have no blood in their body"
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yeees, because if you're bleeding to death and are probably unconscious to boot, you're in such a great position to make a rational and informed decision.
It's the nature of this particular beast that there's NO WAY of giving consent.
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.
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