Deep Cold Coma | |||||||||||||||||
When a person is approaching the end phase of a hopeless terminal disease what if they were able to opt for a voluntary coma where their body was kept at a very low temperature to stall the progress of the disease but still keep the brain and heart alive.This might buy the patient several years until a better treatment for their disease was developed.
Whataloadof, Jan 05 2008
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Aside from general considerations, one would have to ask whether the insurance companies would pay for such.
I believe that families have enough difficulty dealing with a comotose terminally ill patient that has tubes and ventilators going for months (now) with really no chance of recovery, where-as this would only make months into years and it would be worse.
And medicine doesn't move very fast.
I can't think of any one thing that would've killed people twenty years ago that doesn't still kill most of them today. Chemo, heart transplants, etc. are not new treatments. Stem cells will never be clinical, they're a waste of money IMO.
Cancer survival rates have soared in the past 10 years. Every day brings a new development. The number of clinical trials reaching phase 2 and 3 is greater than ever. Childhood cancer is getting more curable by the day. Even brain cancer is starting to give up some of its secrets. Parkinsons and MS are on the ropes. Gene therapy is improving steadily. A universal flu vaccine is nearly ready. DCC would need to be viewed as a kind of death. You would have to accept that your loved one was now, for all intents and purposes, gone but with the small possibility that they might be brought back in a decade's time. The psychological/emotional problems of all concerned would have to be carefully addressed. The facility for DCC would be much like a Cryogenics facility with the key difference being that the individual is still actually alive.