In science fiction, suspended animation is usually about freezing a person so they can travel long distance through space without the pesky side effect of being super bored during a years-long journey.
In real life, suspended animation is a new, life saving technique doctors are about to begin testing on gunshot and stab victims.
Basically, when a patient has serious, massive trauma, they often bleed to death before doctors can start patching them up. With this new technique, called “emergency preservation” a person is put into suspended animation by cooling the body down to as low as 50-degrees.
For reference, hypothermia happens when the body’s temperature drops below about 95├é┬║F.
This is way colder than that, so how do they do it? Dozens of bags of ice? Nope! They replace ALL of the person’s blood with an ice-cold saline solution.
Once their blood is replaced, they are legally dead. No pulse, no brain activity, no nothin’!
People can apparently remain in this state for hours before being brought back to life.
How is a cold, dead body brought back to life? They put your blood back and warm you up. Simple as that (though we bet it’s pretty complicated when you get down to it!)!
This is absolutely amazing! A team is now ready to test the procedure at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, so let’s hope it’s a success and they start using it at hospitals everywhere!
Killing people to save their lives… if that doesn’t scream “the future” then we don’t know what does!
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