From: mlorrey@yahoo.com
Date: Mon Apr 21 2003 - 17:24:45 MDT
From: "Michael S. Lorrey" <mlorrey@yahoo.com>
X-Mailer: YaBB
[quote from: Adrian on 2003-04-21 at 16:51:25]
--- Mike Lorrey <mlorrey@yahoo.com> wrote:
> \"You mean they actually ALLOW people to engage in
> elective abdominal
> surgery with only catgut holding them
> together!?!?!?!?!\"
>
> If anyone is aware of any new technologies in this
> area, I'd love to
> hear about them.
Google for \"surgical tape\". Sutures provide some
structural support, useful for deep incisions while
the body's own connective tissues reattach, but they
simply don't cover the wound itself.
Googled. Nothing seems to apply to what I am talking about. In the case of my
mother, she had her stomach stapled, and the small intestine attached to the
top of the stomach. Two days after surgery, an adhesion from an old surgery
a foot or two down the intestine caused a kink in the intestine and a backup
of fluid, which built up pressure and burst the sutures of the intestine and
stomach.
While I was in the Air Force, the military started using superglue for
skin cuts, sutures, etc. as a quick means of sealing a wound far better
than sutures are capable of. I guess I had assumed that by this time,
13 years later, that medical advances had developed adhesive sealants
for subcutaneous suturing applications. Perhaps involving some sort of
hypoallergenic polymerizing that acts like a sort of super-clotting that the
body can then heal through quicker.
Such an adhesive would have immense applications in trauma cases, especially
in disaster/triage situations, where bleeding and sterilization are
significant problems.
---- This message was posted by Michael S. Lorrey to the Extropians 2003 board on ExI BBS. <http://www.extropy.org/bbs/index.php?board=67;action=display;threadid=55648>
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