Posted on 03/28/2014 7:48:37 PM PDT by neverdem
Doctors will try to save the lives of 10 patients with knife or gunshot wounds by placing them in suspended animation, buying time to fix their injuries
NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time.
Surgeons are now on call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to perform the operation, which will buy doctors time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal.
"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."
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 Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.
The benefits of cooling, or induced hypothermia, have been known for decades. At normal body temperature around 37 °C cells need a regular oxygen supply to produce energy. When the heart stops beating, blood no longer carries oxygen to cells. Without oxygen the brain can only survive for about 5 minutes before the damage is irreversible.
However, at lower temperatures, cells need less oxygen because all chemical reactions slow down. This explains why people who fall into icy lakes can sometimes be revived more than half...
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
***suspended between life and death***
And still they are more alive that most Dems.
I guess these docs never saw the movie ‘re-animator’.... And maybe they should.
While in this state will an automatic vote for the dem be cast? Just wondering
Undead Thread?
Cold Potassium....
Anyone ever have a potassium IV?
I cannot think of the utter agony one would experience if there was any conscious mental activity.
45 years old, Gen X, and I’m seeing science fiction happen right before my eyes that I thought I’d never see in my lifetime. I’d jump for joy if the implications weren’t so damned scary.
Is there ANY possible topic that can be posted in here that won’t be ruined by people turning it into political crap? Just wondering.
Anyone ever have a potassium IV?
Me.
Hurts like hell huh? Imagine that multiplied with no end.
Hell incarnate.
If you go to a Mopar forum you kind of expect people to be posting about cars. If you go to a Film Noir forum you kind of expect people to post about old movies. When you come to the premier online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism on the web ...
No thanks-- I'd rather eat my bananas than have them injected.
No.
Dig your homepage.
Well traveled.
Gotta knock Venice off my list.
That would certainly count as “undead”.
I’ve had one as well. You are completely right...hurts like all get out!
I can’t imagine it multiplied.
I see law suits in the making.
Just wait until the first budding young rap star either does not wake up or wakes up a vegetable. The Dickie Scruggs of this world will be on this like Oprah on a baked ham.
Mom, aged 81, was rushed to the e-room last year due to nausea. Blood test revealed critically low potassium. She was admitted, conscious, for 2 days and administered potassium IVs. She said it burned like Hades and made the nurses dial back the flow rate for a little relief.
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