Now when I say that these outfits aren't aligning their practices with being able to revive their customers, I mean that they are performing sub-optimal perfusions. Rarely are they hiring Certified Clinical Perfusionists. I've read their accounts of their support teams being in a funeral home struggling for over an hour to find the femoral artery to perform a perfusion, when CCP's in life-saving situations do this kind of thing in minutes, doing a coronary artery perfusion, a superior location to perfuse but requiring more skill and time. Ridiculous, little more than medical theater.
This is absolute nonsense. There no fewer than four falsehoods in that paragraph.
1) CCPs don't perform femoral cannulations. They have no surgical skills at all. They run the machines used to perform clinical perfusions. Surgeons do vascular access and cannulation.
2) Cardiopulmonary bypass is very rarely used in time-sensitive situations in clinical medicine. When it is used to treat cardiac arrest, the vascular access route used is femoral, just like field cryonics. Surgeons of other specialists who can do percutaneous femoral cannulation fast enough to save the life of someone in cardiac arrest are rare, and virtually unavailable for something like cryonics. Hiring such a surgeon full-time would cost more than anyone in cryonics could pay, and they would quickly lose their skills from lack of practice because cryonics cases are so infrequent. The best bet is to try and hire surgeons on contract, train other specialists to do the surgery, or use morticians if they are the only help available, all of which cryonics does.
3) Most cannulations done in clinical medicine are not time-sensitive. They are done as part of elective surgeries on patients WHOSE HEARTS ARE BEATING during vascular access surgery and cannulation, and for whom there is therefore no time urgency, certainly not the urgency of someone in cardiac arrest.
4) In the operating room at Alcor, Alcor does use the thoracic route and cannulates the aorta and right heart. As previously explained, these techniques were developed at Alcor by a researcher from a major university cardiothoracic research lab, and who used to himself teach cardiothoracic surgeons. That very same person, Jerry Leaf, did the surgery on the Dora Kent case that you wrote about. (Incidentally, there is difference between saying you think somebody committed a crime vs. saying that they actually committed a crime. Look up "defamation per se".)
In response to the narrative of alleged under-utilization of medical professionals in cryonics, I recently wrote the following elsewhere.
Except for the very small number of people who choose to sign up for it, practically no one values or cares about cryonics. No one takes the time to learn its premises, its history, the technologies it's predicated upon, or what technical elements will ultimately determine its success or failure. There are no schools or generally-recognized standards. No one cares. This includes mainstream medicine and mortuary science.
Against this backdrop, it's not credible that there is a conspiracy among cryonics companies-- companies run by people who want cryonics for themselves --to suppress a tide of experts who could easily step in and do cryonics better. There is no corps of knowledgeable physicians or morticians ready and able to deliver cryonics services that is being displaced by incompetent lay people.
So what do cryonics organizations do? They train lay people and Emergency Medical Technicians to do tasks suited to those levels of expertise. They use morticians to help with some aspects of cases, including vascular cannulation. They contract with sympathetic medical professionals who help with expertise-intensive aspects of cryonics cases when they can, ideally multiple professionals for redundancy. They hire full-time medical professionals for certain roles when they can afford to do so, and when candidates can be found. Or they allow their members to contract with companies, like SA, who do the above.
This mixture of people is then cast into world where they must perform these unscheduled procedures at short notice anywhere within the country, and sometimes beyond. Where they must lug hundreds of pounds of equipment and perfusate to do it. Where sometimes they have to wait weeks at bedside, only for the patient to recover. And where there is no mainstream infrastructure, support, or understanding of what they do. And, recently, where they are bitterly criticized when cryonics cases fail to meet the same standards as scheduled mainstream medical procedures with entire hospitals, universities, and industries that support them.
There are no mainstream medical teams waiting in the wings to do cryonics procedures to some higher standard. There is no mainstream medical procedure or infrastructure for vascular cannulation of human remains undergoing mechanical CPR while immersed in a ice bath, and who've been dehydrated by the process of dying. Cryonics organizations have had to invent such procedures and find and train people willing to do them because no one else was.
Cryonics patients are people who, by definition, have been consigned to *destruction* by mainstream medicine. They are people who have been "prescribed" burial or cremation, and for whom the very idea of vascular cannulation surgery is greeted with a smirk by mainstream medicine. That cryonicists manage to do what they already do in face of such hostility, indifference, and resulting logistical obstacles is remarkable.
Edited by bgwowk, 05 December 2010 - 05:11 PM.
