X-Message-Number: 2955 Date: Sat, 30 Jul 1994 22:15:37 -0400 (EDT) From: David W Crippen <crippen+@pitt.edu> Subject: CRYONICS Treating Shock I note in my mailbox an elementary diatribe on shock . There is no accompanying abstract as to why this was sent or what it means so I'll speculate. Seems to be a primer on recognizing hemodynamic perfusion deficits prospective to freezing a body in the hopes of preserving it. It would seem to me that accurately monitoring the shock state would be merely an academic exercise. Any body that you might want to freeze would have to be legally dead before you could initiate the freezing process. Almost invariably, there is a variable period of hemodynamic and metabolic wind down before the moment of clinical death. If you could legally initiate the freezing process before the moment of clinical death, there might be some value to monitoring it, in order to reverse or attenuate it prospectively. Since you cannot ameliorate this period of "shock" shortly before death, why bother to monitor it? You say in your literature that you are hoping that future bioengineering processes may be able to reverse cellular damage both from disease and as a result of the freezing process. If that were to be the case, than, theoretically that some process could reverse the detrimental effects of "shock". Why bother to treat it before death? David Crippen, MD,FCCM Director, Surgical Critical Care St. Francis MedicalJCenter Pittsburgh, Pa Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2955