Joining Blood Vessels Without Sutures 54
Med-trump writes "Stanford microsurgeons have used a poloxamer gel and bioadhesive, rather than a needle and thread, to join together blood vessels. The technique, published in the recent issue of Nature Medicine, may replace the 100-year-old method of reconnecting severed blood vessels with sutures. According to the authors of the study, 'ultimately, this has the potential to improve patient care by decreasing amputations, strokes and heart attacks while reducing health-care costs.'"
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Oh boy... a real wack job has surfaced.
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Wise up, folks. [wikipedia.org] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll [wikipedia.org] . I'm new here and even I'm sensible enough to not feed the trolls. Seriously, guys like this are not worth your time.
It's not as easy as you try to make it appear. It's been on ./ a few years ago, that not feeding the trolls is usually ineffective. [slashdot.org]
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I love how Chiropractic can improve the life-span of people that haven't ever been treated with it. Now there's a useful medical procedure!
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You've nailed it. I've recently had to service a computer used by a chiropractor. The amount of quackery represented in the software installed there is beyond belief. Astrology, acupuncture "measurements", oh boy. The providers of this software surely must be making a good life for themselves. Sometimes I wish FDA had more teeth to stop it. Say what you want about the european Medical Directive, but if you want to market hardware or software that is classified as a medical device (anything directly used for
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P.S. it is way too early in the morning for the above to be coherent or have a point
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s/you can limit its distribution/you can't limit its distribution/
Re:Best bet? Don't get sick! (Score:4, Insightful)
If that were true then it would require that most people would have to see chiropractics. But lifespan has increased across the board even as only a small fraction of people go get chiropractic treatments.
Here's a better question: When was the last time chiropractice came up with a new treatment that helped heal a disease or problem they couldn't otherwise? Science does this all the time. Small pox and polio, once terrifying diseases, are diseases of the past. Diabetes, once a death sentence, is now manageable. Fifty years ago, childhood leukemia was a death sentence. Now, it is a horrific disease which permanently damages children, but often they live. And the death rates are still declining http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5648a1.htm [cdc.gov]. A hundred years ago, severe liver disease was a painful way to die. Now, we have liver transplants.
This is what real science and real medicine do. They improve. They work. They develop and test new treatments. And when a treatment doesn't work we throw it out. This process is slow, and comes in fits and starts. But the pattern of progress is clear. So again, what have the chiropracticts or the homeopaths or the Reiki fan done? What diseases have they cured? What insights into the nature of humans have they found? Did they find DNA? Did they unravel the genetic code? Did they discovery the many things RNA does in a cell? Instead they've stuck with hundred year old beliefs and kept parroting them.
All of these fringe beliefs have a variety of things in common: they each claim to be able to cure almost everything. The Reiki practitioner can cure any disease by manipulating the energy fields. The chiropracter can cure and prevent any disease by removing toxins" and subluxations. But that's not how the real world works. In the real world, there is no magic bullet. The human body is a wondrously complicated awesome thing. And so different diseases have different causes, not the same causes. And so different problems require different solutions. There's nothing easier when confronted with a massive collection of hard problems to convince yourself that you can solve all of them with a single trick. But that's not how the world works.
Unfortunately for you Dr. Bob, it is extremely unlikely that you will let any of this sink in. You have spent a massive amount of time and resources preaching your beliefs to the world. Humans have a tremendous amount of time admitting when they are wrong even over little things. In your case, the long amount of effort will likely make the cognitive dissonance much too severe for you to even question whether potentially part of your belief system might be wrong. And that's sad. But, you've put yourself in that position. You are the only one who can take yourself out of it.
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Applause
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If Alternative Medicine worked, it would just be called Medicine.
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A few points:
1. Cancer, heart disease, etc. have largely arisen due to increased life expectancy, and the fact that people now live long enough to get sick with that kind of thing.
2. Your other examples of "new" diseases were likely merely undiagnosed and untreated in the past.
3. Wouldn't a cancer-cide be a good thing, coz it would kill the cancer?
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We're all happy to know the next time you lacerate yourself you'll be abstaining from treatment because it's totally evil!
Glue! (Score:2)
Reducing Costs... (Score:1)
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For the insurance companies. What are the odds those savings will be passed on to the patients?
All you have to do is to cut the bloodsucking insurance companies out and go total socialized health care like Canada, and everyone will win.
Re:Reducing Costs... (Score:5, Informative)
Canada is a AAA rated country. They can afford to give a shit.
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I have had several eye opening experience with Canadian health care. First was my dad who got a pacemaker - he was in surgery the next morning after being diagnosed and that probably saved his life. Top of the line pacemaker that apparently cost $30 for just the part in the US.
My personal experience was with our first child that was born premature. Amazing care by a team of doctors and specialists for two months in the NICU, and followup monitoring care until he is three. The only thing I had to pay for
Expanding the scope of existing techniques (Score:2)
This isn't exactly super-new - it's expanding the scope of an existing technique to cases where it hasn't been used before.
Using glue instead of sutures has been around for at least a decade - after getting hit in the face with a hockey pick around 1999-2000, instead of stitches the local hospital glued together the gash above my eye where the lens from my glasses pushed in. (Thank God for shatterproof polycarbonate lenses - the lens saved my eye.) The glue worked very well - not even the slightest scar r
Re:Expanding the scope of existing techniques (Score:4, Informative)
Imagine trying to glue together the open ends of two tube socks. It would be time consuming to line up the ends and not glue the other side together, etc. This technique is like putting a solid round canister inside the junction of the two tubes, making it very quick to line up the edges and glue them together.
In this case the canister is a cylinder of poloxamer gel that is solid when warmed above body temperature. After the connection is glued, the gel cools and liquifies, leaving a perfectly glued joint.
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Furthermore, we're talking about tubes less than 1mm in diameter. Actually, it's quite an achievement to recreate these connections and have them heal that well. It sounds simple, but it's not.
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Furthermore, we're talking about tubes less than 1mm in diameter.
Huh. So that's what the internet was like in the 70s.
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I imagine the ability to repair such small vessels will help a patient keep sensation in the area of an operation?
Polymer that dissolves when cooled (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Polymer that dissolves when cooled (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's more than that. Microvascular work requires a lot of training and specialized equipment. IF (big IF) this pans out, then it's possible that some dumb ol ER doc (ie, me) can put together blood vessels where today we either have to ship them someplace that has the personnel and equipment (slow and expensive) or just wack off the broken bits (cheap, fast but sometimes you want the little pieces part that's left on the floor).
Cool idea. We'll see if it pans out in clinical trials (most cool ideas don't unfortunately).
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For those that didn't read the article... (Score:2)
For those who didn't read the link, the problem is, "How do you glue the ends of a tiny blood vessel together without gluing the lumen of the vessel shut?" Answer is that you need a temporary plug that sits inside and joins the two ends together, while propping it open until the glue sets.
The clever part was finding a material (the polaxamer) that is solid enough to do the job, but melts away at the right speed afterwards, without toxicity.
Ingenious (Score:1)
"How do you glue the ends of a tiny blood vessel together without gluing the lumen of the vessel shut?" Answer is that you need a temporary plug that sits inside and joins the two ends together, while propping it open until the glue sets.
Also, a lot of people don't know that surgeons have been gluing (larger) blood vessels together, instead of suturing with needle and thread for decades already. Cyanoacrylates (superglues) were used outside the USA in medical applications since the 1970's, and speci
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Is it possible to use a needle inserted into the vessel, that you then simply take out by poking a hole in the vessel? Perhaps the vessel can stretch so that a you won't have a big gash in it? How stretchable are small blood vessels"
Serenity (Score:2)
How long until they can suture a wound above the spinal cord with can'd foam.
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How long until they can suture a wound above the spinal cord with can'd foam.
Neurons are harder to deal with than blood vessels. They're more complicated. There are more of them. They are lots smaller.
So probably not for some time.
Star Trek reference (Score:2)
"Oh, I'd give a lot to see the hospital. Probably...needles and...sutures. All the pain. They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures...all the terrible pain!"
-McCoy, City on the Edge of Forever
"reduce heath care costs once the patent expires" (Score:2)
ITYM "reduce heath care costs once the patent expires". Time and again, a breakthrough at a tax-supported university that's supposed to improve healthcare for all mankind becomes a privately-held patent that is used to gouge those who can afford it. Considering Stanford is a private school which accepts very little money from public sources and only for specific projects, there's even less reason for the public to even expect this will be freely available technology.
Awesome (Score:2)
I think it is so awesome to have some innovative way of doing things that is less intrusive to the body, and gives the same results....