Bioelectronic Research Tackles Hemorrhagic Shock

Jared Huston, MD, a trauma surgeon at Northwell Health on New York's Long Island, spoke straight to the point about the current state of treatment for hemorrhagic shock. While traumatic wounds to extremities can be treated with a tourniquet, such wounds suffered internally are often fatal unless the patient can be transported quickly to an operating room. "There are no efficacious approaches to treating noncompressible hemorrhage," Huston said. "That's really the problem. If you're injured intra-abdominally or in the chest, and you're not brought somewhere where a trauma surgeon can operate on you and stop the bleeding, you're in real danger. Yes, you can give fluids or blood, but those are just temporizing measures." Huston, however, is in the vanguard of exploring novel ways of addressing such hitherto untreatable trauma. Also an assistant professor in the Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine at Northwell's Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Huston is one of the inventors of a technology called (and trademarked) the Neural Tourniquet. The technology uses electrical pulses to stimulate the vagus nerve into signaling the circulatory system to inhibit bleeding. According to Huston, the advantages of vagus nerve stimulation include its non-invasive nature and adaptability to numerous deployment scenarios, including battlefields, emergency rooms, and even patients' homes. "The advantage of this technology is it is not placed locally at the site of the injury," Huston said...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Electronics Source Type: news