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[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

If there is anywhere where medicine must be effective and quick it's the battlefield.
There have always been new procedures and meds specifically for use in the battlefield.
This thread is to talk about such things and if we're lucky, medical students or doctors who are willing to talk about them here.

The new thing that's inspired me to make this thread is a new medical tool being added to the military's field kit, Xstat.
It is basicaly a giant syringe filled with sponge pellets used to soak up blood and bodily fluids and close up bullet wounds so soldiers have a much lowered risk of bleeding out.

Use this thread to discuss stuff like this.
Created because I thought it'd be a nice read to hear about some cool medical stuff.
I suppose not military medicine can be discussed here too

Never mind the above this is just going to be a general medicine/medical discussion thread

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I suppose I'll attempt to start off a discussion


Bacteriophage therapy.
Who thinks it's a good replacement for anti bacterial meds and who thinks it's just a bad idea and who has no idea what this is?

In my honest opinion I think it's a great idea but the phages would need to be monitored to ensure they don't start infecting human cells

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

It's a very very very small chance that it can happen but the FDA has enough fear about it that they have said they must test each different type of bacteriophage to make sure they don't which basicaly makes this therapy impossible to use for the next few decades.

Though there is a country or two that already use this therapy and you can aparently buy small bottles of phages and apply the fluid in the bottle to infected wounds to help heal them.
Though not much research has been put into it by the US....

[scrdest]

It's not that simple. Phage therapy is not a replacement for antibiotics, it's something that exists independently of it. One of the major issues with phages is that you need to get them on-site: now, this is easy with antibiotics, antibiotics are straightforward - get into bloodstream, let the circulation do its magic. Phages are, whatever way you bite this, viruses. Proteins and nucleic acids, and most of the immune system is geared towards recognizing those which don't belong there. Makes sense to use them on skin or easily accessible surfaces inside the body, but there's that.

Thought antibiotic immunity was bad? Unlike antibiotics, bacteria and phages co-evolved. Hell, one of the recent Big Deals in Biotech is figuring out something that acts more or less like bacterial cell's immune system (CRISPR-CAS system, in case you wanna google it). If you want effective treatment, you have to keep the new phages coming. And shit's costly.

poh's got the right idea, phages do not infect human cells. Viruses are highly specific, actually. Only a handful can cross over easily, and even then, they sometimes act wholly different. Case in point, Ebola, HIV on monkeys even though it mutated from SIV, so on.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Huh
The article we read in Biotech was about a doctor who, technically illegally, got a cocktail of phages from another country for roughly $3 a bottle and used a device that sprayed the phages onto the infection and blew away the layer of dead cells ontop or something like that.

The big advantage I can think of with phages is that bacteria can't be 100% resistant to it, the right phage will always kill if while some and eventualy all bacteria will have resistance to antibiotics

That's the reason I said it's a replacement, antibiotics won't work in a hundred years or so because bacteria will just have a natural resistance to it

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Maybe that was the case
Sorry for any confusion, it's been awhile since I learned about it.

I thought that was the reason woops.
I do remember something saying they wanted to test each different phage though, I guess I got the wrong reason.
I can ask my teacher about it tomorrow if I still have school and don't wake up with a fever again.

[LordBucket]

meds specifically for use in the battlefield.

I advocate preventative medicine in this case: don't have wars, no soldiers need be harmed. But since this wasn't really intended tobe a philosophical discussion, I'll just point out that injectable nanobots to eliminate cancer are entering the clinical trial phase this year. If that works out...the next few years in medicine might be very interesting.

It's not too many steps from curing cancer with a method like this to potentially curing all infectious disease. And then presumably not too many more steps to super science-fictiony stuff like organ repair, limb regeneration, etc.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

They've already started partial limb regeneration.
There is a powder made from pig blatter extra cellular matrix that can be applied to encourage stem cell occurrence or some other to repair damaged bits.
Not whole limbs but the one I know about was used to regenerate a guys finger that got the first digit and a half cut off and the finger that regenerated had the same fingerprint.

They are also researching organ printing with complext 3d printers.
Also an engineer looked into making things like artificial livers by using a modified cotton candy maker to make bundles of cotton candy with bits of Carmel sticks in it, suerging that in silicon and dropping that in water to dissolve the sugar of and bam! You have yourself an organ blank with blood vessles premade

[smeeprocket]

Problem with nano-bots is the potential for grey goo

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There is virtually no possibility of grey goo. It requires an unreasonably high complexity and variability for microscopic machines. The case in point is that nanomachines and the cells of living things are not all that different, not even macro-scale. Even humans take in outside matter both to repair themselves and to replicate further humans, yet we have not converted all matter to humans. Grey goo would be hard to create and fairly easy to stop.

[smeeprocket]

if it did happen, how would it be easy to stop?

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Problem with nano-bots is the potential for grey goo

That's if they are self replicating
Medical nanobots generaly aren't self replicating since you don't want them to clog up the body. 


Also on a slightly similar topic, artificial blood.
I got to talk to a chemist working on artificial blood and they had something close to it, it was a clear fluid that was made to break up cholesterol or stop blood clots (ya I know it's not even close to artificial blood but this is what they said in response) well they tried FDA testing it on elderly patients with blood clots in their brains, they used (ultrasound?) to move the fluid around (the fluid was made of very small particles, smaller than blood cells) and attempt to break up the blood clots...
It had about a 65% success rate IIRC but several patients died during procedure along with other problems so it was not accepted by FDA regulations or some other

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Please keep discussion on medical basis and not about self replicating robot problems.
If you want to talk about how the nanobots used on humans work it's fine. Or cyborg bits on humans and such but no robotic problems like grey goo please.