X-Message-Number: 33365
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From: Gerald Monroe <>
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2011 12:28:56 -0600
Subject: Re: CryoNet #33358 - #33362
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Melody : A piece of paper doesn't guarantee that you are good at something.
Given that slightly over 200 cryonics cases have been performed in all of
human history, there *is no* formal training pathway to prepare someone to
save the minds of the recently deceased. I guess the closest match would be
training as a vascular surgeon, a perfusionist, or perhaps as a PhD in the
hard sciences.
All of those education paths take years to decades, and earn you a
professional license that you would be at risk of losing if you were to
participate in anything controversial. If you read the case report in
question, an M.D. WAS present during this case. Email me for the report.
It's funny you mention that regarding the blood clots : because Mike
actually mentioned that very issue. He specifically explained his
observations : an instrument to visually look at the outer surface of the
cortex. Those capillaries are the farthest from the arteries, so if they
don't visibly clot up, it's a good sign. Moreover, he isn't saying there's
no clotting at all : Mike is saying that since the patient was preserved
under better conditions, he doesn't see the clots that were visible in most
other cases. He is in no way claiming there is no damage at all : the hope
is that the better procedure caused less damage, leaving more information
preserved.
The reason I believe Mike is that he's honest about a great many things.
His reports don't gloss over things when a case goes bad, his technical
explanations are correct up to my level of education, and so on. I've never
seen him claim degrees he doesn't have, merely that he performed the surgery
or connected the bypass equipment, etc.
Have you TRIED to contact Mike and give him advice? Or contacted the folks
and Alcor and volunteered your services?
I actually agree with you in that there's a reason cryonics is small. *
Partly* the problem is a chicken-egg issue : today, cryonics is too small to
have access to or to *afford* teams of full time, fully formally trained
folks in the relevant field. The reason the teams have people without
formal training on them (and this is one factor leading to *mistakes*, as
Mike Darwin himself points out has happened a huge number of times) is
because those are the only people available for whatever the pay is (and the
need to be on call). Read about the early days of cryonics, and you will
realize that compared to those days, Mike is a legitimate expert in the
field.
I think that when the people with wealth look at cryonics, they don't see
the trapping of an institution they want to donate to : no marble corridors
and the like. Hospitals competing for the same donations *look* enormously
better, and they are crammed to the gills with extraordinarily well paid
employees with enormous amounts of formal education.
Yet a hospital will give you painful, futile treatments until you breathe
your last and leave you to rot under a sheet in the morgue. *Reality* is
different from appearance.
The only way cryonics can progress is that good people have to stand up for
it. Again, find out what it takes to join one of the cryonics teams. They
won't accept your advice as a stranger on the internet, but if you
demonstrated your abilities in person and did a few cases you might.
Your opinions are not unusual or even insightful : the fact that hospitals
that forcibly keep hopeless patients breathing as their brains rot
irreversibly away using hundreds of billions of dollars of national wealth
while cryonics has a paltry few million proves that. There's a reason that
nearly all of the hundreds of millions of Americans ignore cryonics even
though nearly everyone has been exposed to at least the concept somewhere.
Gerald Monroe
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