Someone's got far too much time on their hands!

 

That is one great post, thanks for the laugh! Did you sell those {in}famous heads or what? I think I recall hearing that you did?

"Resuscitation" is not "reanimation". Dead is dead in medicine (or pre-hospital care) with a couple of specific exceptions. TV and other media have created a lot of misconceptions in this area. It's gotten to the point where we sometimes engage in futile resuscitation efforts so we can tell the family "we did everything" but were not successful. This is a pointless waste of resources which is dangerous to the staff (blood and body fluid exposures are common in these circumstances) and therefore unethical. It really amounts to assaulting a dead body and then lying to the family about what we did and why. But it has become common practice. The motivation, at least, is largely benign in that we hope it will comfort the family, but the fact that it is necessary reflects the darker motivations of "defensive medicine" and the eroding faith of people in physicians (and in other professionals) that can be laid largely at the feet of plaintiff's lawyers.

Rich

 

UB is still the "owner of record", Rich but he has consigned them for some reconstructive surgery. That prompted my reference.

BTW, UB is a hoot! Cool guy also.

Defensive medicine as you described it bothers me. I don't even want to know how high the premiums are on malpactice insurance for cutters.

 

For some reason this put in mind of some oddities I have seen in regards to how much damage a person can absorb and still function, if only for limited time.

I'm speaking specifically of bullet trauma.

I'm not the first one to observe this and I wont be the last, but it still fascinates me the way one guy can receive a non-life threatening hit in an extremity and drop like a marionette with cut strings, never to move again; while another guy can soak up lead like Rosie O’Donnell sucking up popcorn shrimp at a seafood buffet, but keep functioning long after they should have stopped.

Obviously there's a psychological component involved, but still...
It can be pretty damn odd.

Another incident, which I didn't personally see but which occurred when I was stationed there; was a guy at Ft Riley Kansas who got run over by a tracked vehicle. Kid was sleeping on the ground, which was kind of soft because of the rain we had been getting, and got run over from feet to (almost) head. The track actually rolled off his shoulder, just missing his melon.

A friend of mine who was a medic saw him at the hospital and said it was the most bizarre thing he's ever seen. First of all, the whites of his eyes had gone mostly red, but more startling was the way he had turned "African-American"

He had what for all practical purposes was a Full Body Bruise.

My friend said that it was due to capillaries being burst from the pressure.
I don't know...
My specialty at the time was blowing things up, not medicine.

Point is, the human body seems to be simultaneously incredibly resilient and astonishingly fragile.

 

About 8 years ago, a friend of mines father was in the military. I was friends with his son, who told me that someone had purposely pushed someone else down in front of a tank (knowing they wouldn't be hurt), and it ran them over, but because the mud was right, they just sunk into the ground and the tank passed over them. I didn't know what to think of it (it sort of made sense), but now i know it is possible.

 

That seems like a real intelligent thing for someone to do in the military. I know a tank generates a huge footprint with its tread but "knowing they wouldn't be hurt" doesn't seem possible when you are dealing with running someone over with a tank! Better hope there isn't a submerged log and the mud is the perfect consistancy. Might be "possible" but I bet it would end in death most of the time!

 

Well...I think he mentioned them doing it to two guys...so I guess that goes from possible, to not very probable.

Back on track though, in the experiment they showed on tv, it involved towing a very light weight trailer and having it hook to something, or hit something to make it stop. My issue is that they used a piece of wood to see if it would go through that (they may of had some foam also). But the point is, is that it was flat so that the objects being thrown at them have no choice but to hit them. In an car crash, if you were hit in the head by something, your head would be able to move to a certain extent. even if your head didn't move, your heads shape could allow a sort of deflection of some off the objects force off to the side. and a third thing is that if the object (klenex box, bowling ball, etc.) is flying forward in a crash, so would you. If you were wearing a shoulder seatbelt, your head would fly towards the stearing wheel of the car, in the natural bending motion, going forward and down. This would all for some clearance for whatever object to fly over your head (assuming you don't have headrests in this car), or at least allow the object to deflect more (more than if you were sitting up right).

 

A note on the amazing and almost freakish capabilities of the human body:

A good friend of mine served numerous tours of duty in vietnam with the USMC. His job was manning a .50cal gun on one of the "walls" of their camp. Once while their base was being attacked he claimed that a VC soldier was moving toward him while he sprayed the man with bullets until he could actually see through him. My friend stopped firing in amazement and the VC actually got so close that he was about to impale him with his bayonet until a blast from a shotgun took his head clean off his shoulders.

Maybe true, or maybe just too much acid in the 70's. Certainly a cool story though.

 

Are you sure it wasn't a Kleenex box that got the VC?

I've heard those 70's acidheads are now TV producers.