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Anal oxygen administration may save lives

economist.com

71–80 of 169 posts

Re: Anal oxygen administration may save lives

#71

First thing I needed to check that I have not woke up in alternate reality and that today is not 1 April, after I remembered that some drug addicts use similar techniques to get high.

Sir, I object. Not everyone who puts drugs in their butt is an addict. Some of us can plug a pill at a full-moon party every so often and go about the rest of our lives as usual thank-you-very-much.

Re: Anal oxygen administration may save lives

#72
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe some kind of worldwide pandemic of a respiratory infection with a significant fatality rate?

Define “significant”

So bad that most countries voluntarily fucked up their economy by closing international transport or even interstate or between cities, closed all bars, restaurants and even stop people visiting their families, to prevent it spreading

Re: Anal oxygen administration may save lives

#74

My wife had toxicology courses and one of the things the lecturer said it's that the rectum is interesting because of its absorbtion capacitors that are not hampered by the body. Alcohol is one example, where you can die of intoxication, while if you have taken it the more traditional way your body would have reacted earlier to get it out.

https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2007-13.html

Re: Anal oxygen administration may save lives

#76
post #13

The rectum is an interesting place. You can apparently also absorb water there, if you are severely dehydrated and unable to hold anything down (eg seasick). All you need, the saying goes, is a funnel and a friend.. full disclosure: I've not tried that!

Bear Grylls (I know) - showed that you can "drink" unsafe water by using funnel and a friend.

Not sure if this is accurate, it's a show after all, but it doesn't seem too crazy.

Re: Anal oxygen administration may save lives

#77
post #61
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre comment. Every patient who goes under general anaesthesia for surgery (life saving or otherwise) is ventilated and usually without issue. “Laying tubes into the trachea” I presume refers to tracheostomy. Let’s be realistic here - if you are requiring a tracheostomy and ventilator, or ECMO the you are severely unwell. A blood transfusion, or small risk of infection is the least of your worries at that p…

I think there are a significant number of general anesthesia patients who don't get intubated, but the big issue is that being intubated for four hours is very different from being intubated for two weeks, which is very likely to kill you. (And, yes, not breathing will also kill you. But intubation was working so badly that hospitals developed proning protocols for covid patients as a less fatal alternative which was…

In general it's true that being on a ventilator for two weeks carries a high mortality, but that's largely due to being sick enough to require ventilation for that duration. Presumably without effective oxygenation or airway protection, these people would have died before the two week mark. COVID pneumonia presents a special case. Early on the thinking was that noninvasive ventilation with bipap etc would promote spread of the virus, so the recommendation was to proceed earlier to intubation. In retrospect this did appear to lead to higher mortality, likely related to ventilator associated pneumonia and sedation and paralytic drugs. So we've returned to a more ordinary stance where intubation is a last resort. So, intubation is bad, but for most circumstances, it beats a trip to the morgue.

Re: Anal oxygen administration may save lives

#78
post #69
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard, from some corny Discovery Channel survival show, that the bottom can filter out salt from the water. So if you're surrounded by ocean with no fresh water, the bottom is the place to go.

Wouldn’t the water seek isotonic equilibrium by moving to the side of the membrane with higher salt concentration? I don’t think that would work in your body’s favor.

Depends on which ocean you find yourself stranded. In the Mediterranean, don't even think about it. The Baltic sea, on the other hand, seems to be quite aenema-friendly.

[Annual mean sea surface salinity for the World Ocean] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity#/media/File:WOA09_sea...

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