I’m nowhere close to being an anesthesiologist, but I thought that this little bit of news was very interesting. This guy is apparently trying to use hydrogen sulfide (which I always thought was a very toxic gas) to place an animal’s body into a period of quiescence so that the natural inflammatory cascade/free radical formation/shock/death corollaries that typically follow severe trauma are prevented until someone fixes the primary pathophysiological cause. So far, he’s only been able to get it to work in animals and he admits there are multiple roadblocks to making this work in humans, but if he’s not a crackpot and continues his pathway of success up the evolutionary ladder then this could be pretty revolutionary in terms of how we manage any sort of trauma or code. If not, then it at least stimulates some interesting areas of research that might be able to refine his work and introduce follow-up work that could induce that quiescent state of suspended animation that we only read about in books or watch on TV.

People always wonder how medicine thinks up these crazy meds(sildenafil citrate for ED) or molecules(botulinum toxin for wrinkle release) to use on patients, and I think that this could be one of those amazing discoveries that are in the making right now where people ask: “Who in the world thought this up?”

Of course, the anti-medicine folks will still poo on this sort of thing and reject it, but I think that there are interesting connections with my area of interest(psychiatry).  I’ve heard many people(psych-agnostic and anti-psych) ask why psychiatry thinks that it’s a good idea to administer a medication when we don’t have a great grasp on how it all even works. That’s when I introduce the double blind placebo randomized control trial idea and how such trials can be helpful in establishing a role for therapeutic effect for any medical intervention despite only having theories for why it works. It’s a tragic truth of many parts of medicine(e.g. rheumatology), but it’s not uncommon for us to not know the exact mechanism of action for a medication, disease, or gene product even though we are fairly certain it has some sort of action. Fortunately, that is where science enters and we just wait until everything is eventually fleshed out. That’s probably not very encouraging to people when you say that, but gradual advancement/understanding of a beautifully elegant and complex machine like a human body is something that should at least (in my opinion) be acknowledged by everyone and nicely fits into a universe where not everything is well understood either. At some point, we all have to come to terms with how little we actually know, and if you’re lucky then you learn to enjoy snippets of scientific news as they are slowly uncovered every day.

More credit to dialytech