Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Reanimation

Episode Date: October 25, 2013

Welcome to Sawbones, where Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin McElroy take you on a whimsical tour of the dumb ways in which we've tried to fix people. This week: THE DEAD WILL WALK. Music: "Me...dicines" by The Taxpayers (http://thetaxpayers.net)

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Saabones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books! One, two, one, two, three, four! We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.
Starting point is 00:00:56 The medicines, the medicines, the escalant macaque for the mouth. Wow! Hello everybody and welcome to Saw Bones bones a marital tour of misguided medicine. I am your co-host Justin McElroy and I'm Sydney McElroy Sid we're coming up on November 8th. It's just around the corner. Oh big day big day It's my big special day turning the big three three. Oh It's my big special day turning the big three three Palandrome it once again. What do you get when you turn 33 like what this art bird or glass? Oh, it's the glass birthday. It's the glass birthday No, I actually decided what I want and I know you know
Starting point is 00:01:41 It took me a while and I've been Revising a lot of lists, but I think I'm finally I think I I finally know what it is. I think I finally put my finger on it. Well, that's good, because I buy you everything you tell me that you want and then you change your mind. So it's a great ploy. What will we add to the list? We will, here's what we'll add to the list.
Starting point is 00:01:57 I wanna meet Andy Rooney. Andy Rooney? Yeah, Andy Rooney from 60 minutes used to do these hysterical monologues. And I want to meet him. It seemed like towards the end, everything was really confusing for Andy Rooney, everything in the world today. Right.
Starting point is 00:02:18 I remember that. And I, I now, I mean, I am a hip. I'm 33. I understand the world. I'm plugged in, I guess you could say. Right, and he needed a lot of help. Do you remember how confused he was by all the produce? He was very confused in that one we saw where he was so confused by all the different kinds of produce that were now available. I feel like I could help Andy Rooney get the swing of things. I could be his sherpa through this modern world. To be fair, he also seemed kind of angry
Starting point is 00:02:48 about all the produce that was available. Like maybe, maybe we've over complicated things. In his day, he was lucky if he could get half a crab apple. Now we got everything, kind of, rambutan, pomegranates, SIE, everything. Oranges. Oranges. Oranges.
Starting point is 00:03:06 So I want to meet, what? What? Oranges. Yeah, oranges. Oranges are great fruits. They're underrated. Yeah, I think he was probably wicked into oranges. I really just got into oranges this year.
Starting point is 00:03:18 So maybe Andy Rooney didn't know about them yet. Maybe he wasn't plugged into oranges. What I'm saying is I want to meet Andy Rooney. And I want think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true.
Starting point is 00:03:36 I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true. I didn't think that's true but I figured you'd have a fix. Oh, oh, you know, you know that he's already passed away. Yeah, yeah, I know he's passed away. I just want to meet him. I want to meet Andy Rooney. I mean, like, do you want me to set up some kind of like video clips, like Home Alone style,
Starting point is 00:04:00 where it's kind of like Andy Rooney's talking to you, but really I'm just pausing it at specific moments in the conversation. Do you want me to do one of those? Cause I couldn't do that. But I bet I could pay for it too. I get into that count I tend to get your no good stinking cockas. I don't know. One, two, ten.
Starting point is 00:04:17 Okay, homelone everybody. Still relevant. Still relevant after all these years. No, I want to be in any rooting. I want you to bring it back to life for me so I can meet him. Now you understand that that's not a thing that doctors do. Well, it doesn't mean they haven't tried though, right? I mean, this is something that we have wanted to do for ages.
Starting point is 00:04:43 I mean, it's one of our most popular myths. I think you could say in a lot of cultures is that we bring someone back from the dead. Well, I think that's fair to say. Certainly, because we are constantly faced with the idea of mortality, ways to overcome that and theories and myths and legends and then actual maybe even experimentation with bringing the dead back to life certainly has occurred.
Starting point is 00:05:11 I'm assuming judging by the fact that the world has not delivered Elvis back unto us that this is not because he's not gone but exactly right. I'm assuming that this hasn't been successful yet. No, not so much. How do we get started? The quest for reanimation, as it were, you know, spiritually dates back thousands of years, but let's not get into that, because that's not my realm. We should mention, by the way, this is our spooky Halloween episode of As Zombies. Much like the History Channel, episode of As Zombies. Much like the History Channel, we like to take, we like to take the entire month of October off
Starting point is 00:05:48 to stop telling the truth. This is something we've remarked on several times during every Halloween season. The History Channel just takes a break. It's not history anymore. The Weird Stuff Channel. The Weird Stuff Channel. I mean, there's a history of vampires.
Starting point is 00:06:02 No, there's not. No. This is our show, The History of Werewolves. There's no history of werewolves. There's no werewolves, so there's a history of vampires. No, there's not. No. This is our show, the history of werewolves. There's no history of werewolves. No werewolves, so there's no history of them. That's not a thing. What are you talking about? They do a lot of aliens.
Starting point is 00:06:13 A lot of aliens. And they have, there are a lot of ancient alien, like theorists, a lot of people who claim that that's their profession. And I have to imagine that that's your hobby and that like your profession is working at Best Buy. I don't know. Well, your profession is selling books to dollars.
Starting point is 00:06:33 Your profession is something else because who is making a living off of being an ancient alien? I have to imagine that. The story. I heard that history is doing a show called Ancient Aliens and they thought, oh, I gotta give me some of that. Yeah, me, expert.
Starting point is 00:06:47 I've got this great hair and this mustache. I'm kind of, I'm ready. Said 1700s. Take it back. Okay. So the 1700s, and as I said, we're going to stick to scientific attempts at reanimation because, darn it, Justin, I'm a doctor, not a spiritual leader. Not a spiritual leader.
Starting point is 00:07:05 Not a history channel. The first one to probably experiment with reanimation was Lazaro Spalanzani, who was actually a priest. He was fascinated with the idea that we could bring the dead back to life, perhaps. But he didn't really do much in an effort to actually achieve that goal, other than cut the heads off snails and wait to see if they would grow back. So he's basically a 13-year-old boy. But with high aspirations. Yeah, and the ability to turn bread into the flesh of Jesus Christ. Right, big dreams, big goals. Big
Starting point is 00:07:41 superpowers. Pretty much it just didn't, didn't achieve much, but at least he was thinking about it. Yeah, in a sciencey way. Head his head on the, eyes on the prize, as it were. In the 1700s, we also meet Johann Dippel, which I'm sure you know who that is. I know, I'm absolutely not. Well, most would claim that he is, you know, the real Dr. Frankenstein.
Starting point is 00:08:06 Oh, the, like you mean the one that inspired Mary Shelley to write a famous book? Exactly. And we'll cover this in great detail because you can't talk about bringing the dead back to life and not talk about Frankenstein. But, and there were many inspirations, but the one that was known as the Dr. Frankenstein, well, not in this time, but later, was Johann Dippel. Now to be fair, he was, if anything that he was really good at, it was robbing graves. He did a lot of that.
Starting point is 00:08:37 Yeah. Well, that's Step one. You got to start somewhere. Right. From the ground up. So he would, he would rob graves. From the ground up. But him, thanks would rob graves he would from the ground up. But I'm sure thanks. That was a good one. Thanks. Well.
Starting point is 00:08:50 Keep working on it. I'll keep workshopping it. I'll come up. You'll get there. I'll get there. It's a good you got a good start. I'm trying to do ground up. Haha. That's better. Is that what you needed? I need a laugh track. I need to be operative for absolutely. I need that. I do need a laugh track. Sorry, I keep derailing you. What did he do besides Rob Graves? That's step one. I can do that. So he took parts of the corpses and the belief is that he was
Starting point is 00:09:17 taking them back to his lab and applying different elixirs to them and chopping them up and applying different, you know, I don't know, connecting them in different ways and trying to bring them back to life, like re-sowing people back together. In reality, what he was probably trying to do was make some sort of elixir out of corpses to extend his own life eternally.
Starting point is 00:09:38 And that's how we got Pepsi. That's the story of Pepsi. That's the story of Pepsi, happy Halloween. That's not true. That's the story of Crystal Pepsi. That's the story of Pepsi. Happy Halloween. That's not true. That's the story of crystal Pepsi. That's the story of crystal Pepsi. It's made from corpses. That's not drink easy. Late 80s. That's not true. Please don't sue us Pepsi. Please don't sue us Pepsi. Yes, he definitely took bodies back to his layer and it has to be if you're taking corpses back. Even if you start with like a cozy long glow, this is my sunroom. No, it's not. It's a layer. There are corpses. Once you are robbing graves and taking bodies back to your house, it's a layer.
Starting point is 00:10:17 You should start calling the morgue at the hospital, the layer. The layer. Take it down to the layer. Justin saw the the morgue in the hospital for the first time. Just walked past the door. They just leave the door out there labeled Borg for anybody to see. Completely freaked out. I get spooked. This is why I try to keep him out of my work place. So he wasn't very successful other than an inspiring, I guess, a great, you know, literary genius. Otherwise, not so much in reanimating the dead. When we get into people who actually did something in this effort, Luigi Galvani is probably
Starting point is 00:10:52 our first scientist. Not familiar, tell me about him. So he was an Italian doctor, he was also a physicist. And in 1771, he noticed, this is the kind of, again, a lot of these stories are probably apocryphal. We don't really know, is this really how this happened, but it's a great story, and so we're going to tell it. So he noticed, he was working with static electricity.
Starting point is 00:11:15 And he, the way that he was working with it is he was skinning frogs and using their skin to, it somehow, there were electrical charges building up on the frog skin. And I don't know why that's how he got to that, but there you go. So he was skinning frogs in his kitchen or lab or let's hope lab. And he accidentally picked up, well he picked up his scalpel unbeknownst to him that it was electrically charged from all of the ions from the stack electricity that he was you know studying And as he placed it on the the exposed frog muscle He touched the sciatic nerve of the frog and when he did that it made the leg jump out
Starting point is 00:11:59 Can you imagine Back before we understood like nerves and the electrical signals that our body sends how scared, just the worst thing that could happen to you, right then. You have to think the frogs coming back for vengeance. You have to. No, it's like skidding around on the ground, looking for the rest of its body to reattach, do you like T2? Don't talk about T2 before bed, that scares me. Yeah, okay. I'm terrified of the second terminator. I had the liquid one. Don't talk about T2 before bed, that scares me. Okay. I'm terrified of the second terminator, the liquid one.
Starting point is 00:12:28 I don't know. I'll protect you. That's even more frightening. So he noticed this frog leg jump and he thought, okay, there's some kind of inherent like animal electricity that causes, you know, our muscles to work. And obviously we can stimulate it with some, with other electricity, with external electricity. You know, we can kind of create a circuit. So he came up with the idea of using external electrical currents,
Starting point is 00:12:59 you know, electrodes, sticking them on dead things and making them move. This was another inspiration for Mary Shelley. Oh, okay. Yeah, all this was going on, as you'll see, as we move forward, his nephew kind of picks up his work, and all this was going on in the time of Mary Shelley. So she was, you know, there is no one person who probably inspired Frankenstein,
Starting point is 00:13:23 but all of this scientific research was being done and publicized and everybody was talking about it right before she wrote, you know, Frankenstein. So, like I said, he starts this work and it became known as galvanism. You may have heard that term. Her galvanized. That's the same. all these different terms for different things and you know Electric electricity. I don't know. We're going into physics. That's not my area. All right, but they all come from Luigi Galvani He also has a crater of the moon named after him What's it called? Like the crater of galvani. What do you think? Well, you left a lull in there. I thought it might be something interesting
Starting point is 00:14:04 No, he don't you think it Well, you left a lull in there. I thought it might be something interesting. No, what do you think? It was, it's called Joe. Joe the crater. Joe the crater, name for Luigi Galvani. Joe the crater, Luigi Galvani joint. It's called Frog Leg. Frog leg, the crater. The crater.
Starting point is 00:14:18 So, kind of, like I said, this work was picked up because Luigi Galvani fell on hard times. A lot of his work was criticized because other people kind of picked up what he was doing, investigated it further and said, I don't think these animals have electricity in them. I think these kind of tubes that run through their bodies, nerves, they didn't know what they were at the time, maybe transmit some kind of, you know, can transmit like an electrical impulse, but there's not inherent electric activity in the muscles and kind of, you know, can transmit like an electrical impulse, but there's not inherent electric activity in the muscles and kind of took the theory to the more in the correct
Starting point is 00:14:50 direction. But his and anyway, then he went through some bad times and ended up dying to press an impoverty, which is too bad, but he got a crater of the moon named back to him. It's better than I'm probably going to do. Why would you say something like that? I don't know. I'd just be like, want a crater. I'm hoping it's going to be a little bad for me. I'll name a moon crater. I'll buy you a star.
Starting point is 00:15:12 That'll do. Okay. So his nephew picked up his work. His nephew Giovanni Aldini was the one who really went on to kind of, I don't want to say fame, maybe notoriety, for his experiments with electricity and dead things. He started off with stimulating dead animals, same way that his uncle did. But that wasn't enough for a Giovanni.
Starting point is 00:15:37 He craved more. He craved more. I mean, if these techniques could be applied to animals, one in particular, a baboon, he would make its eyes open and its mouth grimace in front of crowds and that terrified people after it was dead, obviously. Yeah, right. So he decided to start experimenting on humans. Ah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:59 Now, it's, you know. Now it's gonna spooky. It's the late 1700s, early 1800s, you want to do human experimentation. There's a group of people you're allowed to experiment on at this time. Criminals. Exactly. Yes.
Starting point is 00:16:15 So it was totally okay for you to experiment on the bodies of criminals who died either through execution or natural causes. That was completely acceptable at the time. Why not? And you could actually pay kind of sponsor criminals who were dying, say like you would pay one of the beetles, you know, one of them, whatever they were, the officials. Oh, okay. Yes. I was super confused for a second. Not like the bug.
Starting point is 00:16:41 Well, I was thinking like, Ringo, why would I pay on the carton for a body? I'm gonna be like, little nom-fuck, fact, John Lennon, Dalton bodies. So, yeah. And Pepsi's made out of corpses. Yeah. This is what you're learning today. So you could pay one of the Beatles,
Starting point is 00:16:58 one of the judicial officials, whatever, to get the body after it was dead. No. I'm sure it was a reasonably priced. And you could pay them to kind of rush things along. So one of the most famous cases was George Forster. Have you ever heard of him? No.
Starting point is 00:17:14 I'm sorry. You always disappoint me. So he was put to death by hanging for the murder of his wife and child. It's actually interesting, the history channel in one of their fake histories does a whole special on this, where they questioned whether or not he really was a murderer.
Starting point is 00:17:30 Oh great, good job humanity. And that maybe it was all a setup. And then they talk about how it was a real life Frankenstein because he was brought back to life, except he wasn't. He may or may not have been a murderer, he died by hanging, and then he was handed over to Giovanni who stuck a bunch of electrodes in him and made him do all kind, made his body do all kinds of things. He made his face contort and terrible ways. He made his legs
Starting point is 00:17:55 move up and down. His arm raised up at one point and clenched its fist and he did this in front of people and wrote big reports around about it and everybody freaked out and thought, oh my gosh. Giovanni found a way to bring the dead back to life. Because they're close. I mean, to someone in that time period, it had to seem like we were, you know, had almost nailed it. Right. I mean, you know, it seemed like that made sense.
Starting point is 00:18:17 Like, here's somebody who clearly is dead. We watched him die. I mean, his, you know, we watched his neck snap and now his eyes are open and his arm just moved. He also did a lot of experiments on the heads of criminals just using human heads Which again, I just think it all sounds very gruesome at some point He had to have realized he wasn't bringing these people back to life And then I don't know what he was doing But I'm sure it was a great side show. Yeah. And like I said,
Starting point is 00:18:47 it's a pain for the research somehow. All of this was going on in the time of Mary Shelley. And I think this is really interesting. So she was hearing all of this stuff and she ended up writing Frankenstein in the year 1816. A series of events probably led to this book being written that I think are really cool. So in 1815 Mount Tambora, which was a volcano in Indonesia, erupted, and it caused these like worldwide temperature shifts. So all over the world got colder for a solid year following this eruption. And 1816 is known as the year without a Summer. That is so strange that you mentioned the Year Without a Summer because that is a small plot point in the new book by Elizabeth Gilbert then reading the signature of all things.
Starting point is 00:19:35 I didn't know that. Yeah, that she talks about that. So I have recently thought about the Year Without a Summer. By the way, great book, if you haven't read it, she's a great fund, a max fund that work and an overall cool lady, so read her book. So check out her book. Anyway, 1816, year without a summer, Mary Shelley.
Starting point is 00:19:55 So Mary Shelley and her lover, Percy Bish, later husband, before her husband, at he was her lover, and they went to the... She's gandiness. Oh my And they went to the... Oh my. They went to their lake house to spend the summer, but it was very cold and wet, and it wasn't a lot of fun to be outside. So instead, they decided to hang out inside all the time
Starting point is 00:20:14 and have a story writing contest. I'd say she won. She probably won. Because she wrote Frankenstein. Yeah. Well, I wrote something good to sort of a adventure of a king and there's dragon. It's a cool book. Hey, check this out. Frankenstein. Mm, Frankenstein. That's good. Lots of people have heard of that book. But mine.
Starting point is 00:20:40 Well, nobody had heard of it then. Then they time traveled into the future. Realized how popular it would be. Time traveled back to 1816. To be fair, you would go to those links to win an argument with me. So that makes sense. Yeah, that's totally fair. So a lot of these should be noted that these experiments continued. Professor A. Hosh continued them on criminals.
Starting point is 00:21:06 And this really, if there was any science of reanimation throughout the 17, 1800s, this is all that was being done. Just shock people. We thought electricity had something to do with life. And so maybe if we just keep applying it to dead people, they'll come back to life. Eventually. It wasn't until the 1950s that we actually had
Starting point is 00:21:28 like any other ideas on how to reanimate people when James Lovelock started dropping rats in freezing cold water. Which sounds like something you'd like to do. Yeah, as long as I didn't have to touch them or see them. Perfect. But you'd just like the idea that somebody's doing it somewhere. Someone is drowning rats. Somebody is eliminating rats for you. Yeah. And then he would try to bring them back to life.
Starting point is 00:21:54 He knew that for some reason, if somebody was not just dead, but really cold and dead, that maybe you could like preserve their cells and then bring them back to life. And what's the obvious way? If somebody's cold, how would you want to warm them up? Blanket. Nope. Hug. Try again. Hugs. It is your rat. Hug the rat. Hug the rat.
Starting point is 00:22:15 Breathe on it. How about a warm spoon? Perfect. Good job. So he would warm up a spoon and hold it to their little rat chest. That is, man, it is always hard to explain in-depth scientific research. But if your kid walks in on that, that's got to be a tough one to sort of walk with it. No, well, I thought if I heated up the spoon, you know, saying it out loud now, I feel a little silly. You're right. This
Starting point is 00:22:41 is kind of a goofy idea. It inspired a lot of research and to be fair the idea that Frozen tissues are better preserved is true. I Don't know about the whole morme spoon No me neither but neither did James Lovelock that didn't stop him. Oh It should be noted. We kind of jumped ahead to the 50s But in the 40s the Soviet Union they did not make any Progress in reanimation, but they definitely wanted us to think they did 50s, but in the 40s, the Soviet Union, they did not make any progress in reanimation, but they definitely wanted us to think they did. So they came up with a great video. It's on YouTube,
Starting point is 00:23:12 you can check it out called Experiments in the Revival of Organisms. And as, when Justin and I watch this, he pointed out that it is entirely in English that is easy to understand, which tells you exactly who they wanted to hear this video. Yes, us. Yes. So, in this video, Soviet scientists have like a heart, a dog's heart that's hooked up to tubes and they show it beating. Then they have some lungs that are hooked up to some other tubes and they show them, you
Starting point is 00:23:43 know, insufflating and closing and, you know, they're working basically as the idea. And then the culmination of the video is a dog's head that, again, hooked up to some tubes for blood flow, that then responds to various stimuli. Kind of moves its head and looks around and they put some citric acid on its face and it licks it off and it gets startled by a hammer falling near it. They also at the end, I think they're attempting to re-animate the dog completely but Justin has a weak stomach so we had to stop it at this point. Well, I was also eating. I was having a nice boha salad from Wendy's. I couldn't handle that. It's hot chili on it, which I know, yes, no longer makes it a salad.
Starting point is 00:24:29 It's just an idea of a salad is very. Chili and a tiny green bed. I get it. So the dog's head is pretty stupid comments in your pocket. The dog's head is fairly adorable, I should note. Yeah, it is a really cute dead dog said. But it's probably not dead. This is why it's okay for me to say that this was all fake. Clearly, the Soviets were not reanimating dead dogs in the 1940s.
Starting point is 00:24:57 But they definitely wanted us to think they were. And I imagine that would have been pretty intimidating. If you watched that video and thought, holy crap, the The Soviets gonna make armies of dead dogs to come get us. Forget it. And that way I'm out. Me surrender. Give up. That's it, we're out.
Starting point is 00:25:16 And you know, although if all dogs go to heaven, that's gotta be sort of disconcerting for the dog, right? Up there in the race of the Lord, then suck back down in the Soviet Russia. All dogs go to heaven when Soviet Russia says they go to heaven. So, you know, we've kind of outlined the different ideas people had for reanimation and today we don't have a lot of new ones, but the freezing idea is still going on. Oh, really? Yeah. As recently as 2007, we were bringing dogs back to life in labs.
Starting point is 00:25:52 We were basically, you can question the ethics of this, but killing them by replacing their blood with this hypothermic oxygenated saline. So it's cold and it's got oxygen in it. And then three hours later, so put the blood back in and shock them and they come back to life. That is unpleasant. Yes, that is unpleasant. I wouldn't recommend it.
Starting point is 00:26:18 This has been tried before. There was a Japanese researcher before who had frozen cat brains and then warmed them two and a half years later and they still showed electrical activity. And this is a lot of the basis for now. It's really cool you can do research on Dr. Sam Parnia who wrote a book called Eracing Death. And that's he's currently trying to perfect the idea of resuscitation. So we're talking about people who have died very recently. So several hours ago that aren't all the way dead, maybe we could say they're mostly dead. Did you get my reference? It's from the Princess bride. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, mostly dead, mostly dead.
Starting point is 00:26:59 Yeah, remember, remember. So his hospital's rates of revival after CPR and resuscitation are actually really high. They're like 33%. Wow, that's pretty amazing. It's really good when you consider that overall statistically it's like less than, it's like 15% or so. And he's doing much better than that.
Starting point is 00:27:23 And a lot of it has to do with him cooling people down, lowering the body temperature to stop any damage that's done immediately after death and then being able to bring them back later. And this was supported by, there was an Australian woman who fell in the ice while she was skiing in 1999. She found an air pocket that allowed her to breathe longer than you would expect,
Starting point is 00:27:46 but she went into cardiovascular death. I mean, she died for like 80 solid minutes under the ice. They brought her back to the hospital, warmed her up, and shocked her and her heart restarted, and she recovered, which is pretty amazing. Yeah. I'm preoccupied with a question. Okay. And I'm hoping you can help me.
Starting point is 00:28:10 And I know that I'm going to sound a little silly when I ask this, but it's our Halloween episode. So I hope you'll forgive a little, a detour into the macabre. I'll forgive it this once. Why doesn't it work? Like, why doesn't it work? Like, why doesn't it work? I mean, why wouldn't it work? What's the difference between a person who is alive and then what? I don't know what you want to say. They die for some reason, whatever. Nothing like brutal, not like decapitation or whatever, but like why
Starting point is 00:28:45 doesn't it work? Well there are a couple things that were up against and there things that actually if you read this book because I've been reading a lot about this doctor online that he is addressing there are a couple hurdles. One damage to the brain. So you know after, after a certain amount of time, hypoxic or lack of oxygen damage to the brain isn't reversible. He argues the point that right now we kind of put that cut off at like 20 minutes and he says that no, no, no, it's probably much longer. And so, you know, that's one hurdle that we're trying to overcome is that after a while, if the brain's dead, the brain's dead, and it doesn't matter what you do to the heart.
Starting point is 00:29:26 The brain gets damaged when it's not getting oxygen. When it's deprived of oxygen. A lot of this just has to do with, so, your cells have walls, and it's important for them, that they have these membranes around them, that protect them from all the stuff that's kind of floating out around them. They're like baptists, basically. They need protected from the world around them. Got it.
Starting point is 00:29:47 I'm not saying that. I can say that. I was raised wrapped as I can say it. Yeah, I was raised Catholic. I know better than didn't salt anybody else. But so that's one thing is that once these walls kind of get permeated, once these membranes get permeated by external enzymes, that can be very dangerous to the cell,
Starting point is 00:30:06 and that kind of damage isn't reversible. Especially if the nucleus of the cell, a little center part, the control center where the DNA is, you don't want enzymes that can break down that DNA to get in there and mess it up. And once that happens, it's pretty much irreversible. So if that happens on a large scale in the brain, no go. It doesn't matter what you do. So that's one big wall that we're up against. And the other one is reprefusion injury, which is still only, is not completely understood, but the idea that even after blood flow has been stopped. So you're not getting
Starting point is 00:30:41 blood to your brain or to whatever organ at this point. Damages being done, you start blood flow back, so you get the heart pumping again, you get blood flow back there. We see a lot of damage to those cells. They get hit by a lot of toxins and they can't deal with them well. And we think it's because the cells probably wanted to some kind of like
Starting point is 00:30:58 emergency hibernation mode. And then when they're flooded with a new oxygen blood supply again, they can't cope. And so that reperfusion injury is a big problem because you got to get blood flow going again. So how do you do it in a way that doesn't damage the cells? And the hypothermic, like the possibility of cooling people down is the best bet we've got right now. Okay, well that actually makes a lot of sense.
Starting point is 00:31:22 Thank you, Sydney. I feel like I learned something. Oh, no problem, Justin. Hmm. Okay, well that actually makes a lot of sense. Thank you Sidney. I feel like I learned something. Oh, no problem, Justin. That's what we aim to do every Friday here on Sobones. We hope you've learned something and we hope you've had some fun today. If you get a second, why don't you follow us on Twitter at Sobones is our user name so you can follow us there. You can find our new episodes always on the maximum fun network. If you want a shortcut, you can just go to solbonesshow.com. Our email address is solbonesatmaximamfund.org. We have Twitter names. Oh, I'm Justin McRoy. I'm at Sydney McRoy.
Starting point is 00:31:58 S-Y-D-N-E-E. You can review us on iTunes. Oh, that's good. I read all of your reviews. Yes. And they make me happy. I mean when they're nice You can head over to maximumfund.org and check out some of the other programs on the network like stop podcasting yourself judge on Hodgman Jordan Jesse go so many others and Oh my brother my brother and me. I thank you. Sorry. I almost miss my cue. Oh, not my cue. Not your cue. He doesn't pay me to say that And we'll be back with you again next Friday on Salmons until then I'm just a McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy.
Starting point is 00:32:29 And it's always dope, drill a hole in your head. Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture, Artistone Listener Supported

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