Kill patients to save their lives?

American experts are deploying a bold experiment, breaking long-term limitations in anatomy and challenging both the concept of ethics.

The unconscious patients who were taken to the emergency room in the United States due to a bullet or slash can be startled to find themselves suddenly involved in a shocking clinical trial program. The surgeon will drain all the blood in the body and replace it with frozen saline. Without heart rate and brain activity, these patients were clinically dead. Next, the doctor will try to save their lives. Previously, by reducing body temperature and slowing metabolic processes in clinically dead patients, doctors hoped to enlist valuable time to patch a fatal wound. However, scientists have never tested the method of killing patients before saving them as the approach of the expert group of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

When sinking into an ice lake or out of an airplane wing at an altitude of more than 11,000 meters, humans can survive for a few hours despite lack of oxygen if the body is kept cold. In the 1960s, Siberian surgeons began placing children in ice vaults before performing heart surgery to improve the survival of young patients. Patients often get hypothermia before entering the operating room. But hypothermia has never been tested in patients with deep wounds, and so far no doctor has tried to replace the blood with frozen saline in the patient's body, according to The New York Times.

Experts hope this project will be officially approved by the end of this year - (Photo: Shutterstock)

In the experiment of the University of Pittsburgh funded by the US Department of Defense, doctors began the healing process for patients with deep coma and losing too much blood, causing the heart to stop beating. Under normal body temperature, surgeons only have less than 5 minutes to restore blood flow before brain damage.'In such cases, all 10 people had 9 and a half killed' , according to the research leader, Dr. Samuel A.Tisherman. That's why the expert team wants to find ways to improve patient survival via this method.

First, Dr. Tisherman and his colleagues will insert a catheter into the patient's aorta, discharging blood with cold saline until the body temperature drops to 10 degrees C. When the patient falls into death Clinically, the doctor will have about 1 hour to heal the wound before the brain is damaged. After the surgery, they used an artificial heart-lung machine with a heat exchanger to put blood into the patient's body. The blood will slowly warm up the body, and the injury may appear during this process when the cell is suddenly pumped oxygen after a deficiency. If successful, the patient's heart will start to beat again when the body temperature reaches 30 - 32 degrees Celsius. However, it takes several hours to a few days to restore consciousness.

Dr. Tisherman plans to test this method on 10 subjects, conducting an assessment before continuing with 10 others. The experiment was implemented in April, one case per month and it took several years to complete the project. More than 5 hospitals specializing in trauma are expected to participate, including the Medical Center of the University of Maryland in Baltimore. In the face of concerns that patients may fall into a state of vegetation, which is a living but unconscious body, experts support the method, saying they have perfected the technique after doing so on hundreds of dogs. and pigs in the past decade.