French Doctors to Perform Zero-Gravity Surgery

STFS writes "NewScientistSpace has a story about a team of French doctors who will attempt the worlds first zero-gravity operation on a human aboard an Airbus A300 dubbed "Zero-G". The patient, according to forbes.com, was chosen because of his experience with 'dramatic gravitational shifts' as an avid bungee-jumper. The operation will serve as a test for performing surgery in space."

Animals first?

[racecarj]

I am a doctor, and this is the worst type of medicine: publicity medicine. The goal is to get on the news rather than patient care. If these guys really wanted to experiment (and it is an experiment) with low-gravity surgery they would be doing it on animals long before human trials. With surgery, there are so many complications that cannot be predicted. Who knows how low-gravity affects clotting? Perhaps this guy will have a pulmonary embolus and die... there are a million what if's here that be accounted for and it's irresponsible at the least.

Re:How totally unethical

[motorbikematt]

How unethical? How unecessary. If you actually took the time to read the story, you see that the guy is a VOLUNTEER. This type of research, on VOLUNTEERS, is a necessary thing if we are ever going to learn how to perform emergency procedures in microgravity. To compare this to a NAZI death camp is immature, irresponsible, and just plain ignorant.

Re:ISS

[DragonWriter]

As others have pointed out, performing surgery 30 seconds at a time doesn't make sense and doesn't reflect the reality of being in micro-gravity during the whole operation. Why don't they do this kind of experiments on the ISS ?

Because if something unexpectedly goes wrong in surgery on the ISS, you can't restore gravity and/or return to earth in any reasonable period of time.

Re:How totally unethical

[motorbikematt]

It is NOT unethical. Do you even know the definition of ethics?

1. The guy is a volunteer and has undergone months of microgravity training with the doctors.
2. The procedure has been discussed and planned for a long time.
3. The procedure itself is very minor surgery.
4. The knowledge gained from this has the potential to save a life of an astronaut in space.

And to compare it to Nazi's is stupid.

May I suggest you read more about this story here [forbes.com]

Re:Nurse, help!

[motorbikematt]

Probably constant dabbing with sponges or gauze would be useful in stopping the blood from flying away...but keep in mind...the surface tension of blood will keep it sticky to the site of incision, the instruments, and to their gloves. That is of course assuming they don't cut a high pressure spurting artery...then all bets are off. Point is, I don't think this minor surgery will dig that deep.

Having spent a lot of time in microgravity, my main concern would be in keeping the area sterile. Dust, hair, and everything else floats around a lot better in microgravity...and keeping particulate matter out of the incision site is going to be a task. It's hard enough to keep the planes clean of the big dirt from your shoes...it doesn't take much to spread microscopic contaminants

Re:WARNING

[buswolley]

Well, I guess they think I am a troll...The question is... do they think I am a Nazi Troll? I am surely not. But I do think that the French made a huge military mistake in defense strategy against the German threat.

Re:Avid bungee-jumper

[pudro]

Don't get me wrong, I get more ticked off than anyone I know when I hear someone say that there is no gravity on the space station or something like that. But the fact of the matter is that and object in free-fall is experiencing zero gravity. Don't let your knowledge of gravity get in the way of knowledge of relativity just to post some semantic crap.

It's like saying there actually isn't such a thing as centrifugal force. You may be technically right in that it is a result of inertia and that there is no "outward" force, but you have now changed the explanation of the event from something simple that most people understand into something much more wordy that more people will have problems understanding. All because you are ignoring the frame of reference.

Besides, your explanation claims their is no such thing as zero gravity, since gravity is universal. That's like saying you can't "get cold", since "cold" doesn't exist. You can only get less hot, but still hot to a degree. Semantics ignoring relativity.

Re:How totally unethical

[KillerBob]

All of those technologies were developed on volunteers who had no viable alternative. If a doctor believes a patient has a better chance of recovering/surviving an existing procedure than they do from a new experimental procedure, then it is malpractice to apply the experimental procedure, regardless of whether or not the patient volunteers. This is different in other professions, where researchers are free to seek out volunteers who are willing to do things not in their own best interest, but doctors are held to a higher standard than other researchers.

Y'know... bedrest, fluids, and aspirin make a perfectly viable alternative for most viral and bacterial infections. An otherwise healthy adult has an incredibly powerful immune response to most of the bugs that can get you sick. Come to it... grinning and bearing the pain of, say, childbirth or a broken leg is a perfectly viable alternative. Humans were doing it for millenia. But somebody, sometime, had to be the guinea pig who discovered that hemlock will kill you. And somebody, sometime, had to be the one that they first tried aspirin on. At some point in history, those were experimental treatments.

And before you go off on some tangent about how that was hundreds, or thousands of years ago, I'll point this out to you: Aspirin is a very useful anti-inflammatory. It's been used for a couple hundred years to treat a wide variety of things, including inflammation due to arthritis. I'm currently on Diclofenac Sodium. It's a drug that's been developped in the last 10 years to treat... you guessed it... arthritis. Diclo is being used to treat inflammation, minor to moderate pain, and it's seeing some pretty wide use in sports-related injuries. It's actually a pretty neat little wonderdrug, but less than 10 years ago, it was an experimental new treatment in a time when a perfectly viable alternative existed. Ibeuprophen? Also developped within the last 40 years as an alternative to Aspirin and Acetaminophen. Acetaminophen itself was developped in the last hundred years as... an alternative to Aspirin.

And how about organ transplants? There were ways to perform kidney dialysis before the development of the modern dialysis machine. And Iron Lungs? There are perfectly survivable alternatives to a whole lot of the organ transplants that we are now doing as a matter of routine. They may not give the same quality of life as, say, a new kidney would, but they're certainly viable. But somebody had to take a risk with a patient's life to develop the technique for how to perform those surgeries. It's not like you can look ahead a few pages to see how it turns out: these now routine surgeries were experimental at some point.

Medical science would most emphatically *not* be where it is today without doctors trying out experimental procedures and drugs when perfectly "viable alternatives" already existed. It may sound incredibly cold and callous to you, but the medical profession is well aware that sometimes you have to lose a patient in order to advance knowledge. As long as you're not maliciously trying something that you know will harm the patient, and as long as there's a reasonable chance of success, it's not unethical to try something new.

Re:If thats like the Vomit Comet...

[Fastolfe]

You're right. We couldn't possibly learn anything about, say, performing surgery in low-gravity or weightless situations. It's not like we have a space station in orbit, or have plans to go to the MOON for heaven's sake! No realistic application at all. Waste of money.

Ban all research!