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Showing results for tags 'Cardiac Arrest'.
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I was literally just reading this article: "Sudden Cardiac Arrest May Have Warning Signs After All" by Mary Brophy Marcus on cbsnews.com Sudden Cardiac Arrest results in death 90% of the time it occurs. 100% of people who ever died, died from hypoxia, i.e. lack of oxygen to the brain (that is essentially the definition of death). Right now, CPR is the method we use to desperately try and pump recycled oxygen to the brain. It just popped into my head whether or not it's possible to forget the heart while it's not working, and directly inject oxygen into the brain. Okay, now before you start laughing, I understand that it's not as simple as sticking a valve into somebody's ear and blowing oxygen in - the capillaries send blood (and therefore oxygen) into the tiny recesses of the brain, keeping it alive, but I wonder if there is some possible "method" to deliver oxygen into vital portions of the brain *other* than via our vascular system - some sort of injection that can keep critical components of the brain living long enough to get to the hospital. Sort of like immersing someone in ice after they've received serious spinal trauma to prevent swelling from killing them in the first 24 hours (I'm a big proponent of this theory, by the way - lowering body temperature can do near-miraculous things). Maybe there's some type of delayed-release "oxygen canister" that can be connected to the vessels that lead to the brain, and when the heart stops working, you push a button, and oxygen starts flowing through those vessels into vital portions of the brain, long enough to keep it alive until help can be found. Alternatively, I'm thinking of a Hot Wheels Turbo Charger (remember those things from the 1960s?) - a needle blowing out high-pressured oxygen can be inserted into the toughest artery in the human body, and activated with a canister of oxygen when needed, using the concepts of fluid dynamics (both oxygen and blood are fluids) to "turbo-charge" the (now oxygen-enriched) blood through the vascular system. This wouldn't need to be directly below the brain, but anywhere in the body where the artery is least likely to rupture, i.e., whichever one has the most durable walls. I don't even know if it would make it through the heart valves (that's how little I know about the human heart). I have no answers, and I don't even know if any of this stuff is physically possible, but I'm wondering if anyone has even thought about it before. Maybe there's some "alternate path" to the brain, like performing an emergency tracheotomy with a steak knife when someone's throat swells shut. Okay, you can start calling me crazy now, but this doesn't sound any loonier to me than laser eye surgery when I first heard about some Russian doctor "curing" people of being nearsighted about thirty years ago on "60 Minutes" - operating on several patients per *hour* - and quite often, nothing in this world gets done until someone thinks of something disruptive.
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