Pretty simple but the question just came to me. How would surgery work in space? As soon as you made the incision, wouldn’t the blood float out all over the place?
As far as I’m aware, it’s never been tried. Also since nearly everyone who has been in space has only been a few hours from rescue, there’s never been enough of a reason to risk it.
So, no idea.
As for bleeding, liquids tend to adhere to surfaces, so using suction it may be possible to prevent much blood floating around the spacecraft.
Unless you hit an artery, blood doesn’t come out under that much pressure after an incision is made. Suction should be able to handle it. Part of preparing the sterile field involves draping, which often has plastic gutters to catch any leaks; zero-gravity draping could have a plastic tent that has integrated suction. I could also imagine more use of electrocautery.
It’s been tried and it works. The test case was obviously an unimportant procedure with lots of pre-flight prep time, but as a feasibility study was a success. The follow-up apparently involves teleoperation of a surgical robot, which seems strange to me but maybe it’s better to take a robot in to space and have someone from the ground operate rather than teach astronauts to do it.
Could you open the chest cavity without the blood flowing away?
Your assumption here is that when we cut ourselves here on Earth, it’s gravity that’s in charge of keeping most of our blood inside our bodies. I can’t imagine why you’d think that, if for no other reason than there’s no difference between cutting the top side of our bodies and cutting the bottom side. Blood tends to stay where it is due to things like surface tension and inertia. Gravity has nothing to do with it.
I think the OP’s question is a resonable one – you’re confusing “blood emerging from the body” (no one is disputing this, gravity or not) with “once the blood is out, its dispersing into little drops and floating away in difficult-to-control directions”.
You’d be surprised at how little blood is lost during most surgeries. I can’t see how it would be a problem in space, given a basic suction system to keep it from floating away and making a mess.
It would be illegal.
There are no board-certified surgeons currently in space (not sure if there have ever been any in space), so nobody legally qualified to do surgery is out there.
I don’t understand that argument… why would it matter whether or not there are any “surgeons” in space at this very second? I’m fairly sure there have been, and will be again (though doubtless they would elect to delay any procedure until back on the ground whenever possible).
Also, how can it be “illegal”? If astronaut Mike has foolishly gotten a Moon mutant digesting his hand, it’s clear I’ll have to amputate ASAP with the green cheese slicer. Under what law would any court convict me of illegal sugeonation?
This is a question about biology and physics. When a government can redefine the fine structure constant by legislative fiat, this kind of answer will be relevant.
Non-doctors have performed surgery when it it is needed on an emergency basis and no one has prosecuted them. Emergency appendectomies by non-doctors have occurred, with patients recovering. Emergency amputations performed by non-doctors are also a type of operation that might need to be performed in order to save a life in unusual and extreme circumstances.
Generally, if the alternative to attempted surgery is certain death then, with no doctors available, a non-doc might well be given a pass for making the attempt.
And for quite a few operations, particularly on an emergency basis, no one is going to give a damn if a doc is a “board certified surgeon” or not. Sure, it’s better to have such a person on hand, but if there isn’t one, and you have an emergency on your hands, then proceeding anyway might be the lesser of two evils.
Just a couple of thoughts off the top of my head:
Surgery on Earth makes use of a lot of suction both to remove blood and other fluids and to clear smoke from the field when using electrocautery. There has to be a fair amount of air flow through the system to pull semisolids and liquids along. Suction in the hospital is produced by a central system that (I’m told) uses flowing water to create vacuum via the Bernoulli effect. In space you have ready access to hard vacuum, but you probably don’t want to be venting your breathable air in order to suck up some blood, so you need a suction system that captures/filters/reuses the air.
The suction canisters that capture the blood/etc. on Earth rely on gravity to keep the liquids trapped where they can’t clog up the vacuum system. In space this would require filters or centrifugal methods. Given the low pressures at which spacecraft operate, there may be difficulties in generating the kind of airflow needed to pull thick liquids along a narrow tube (drag equations have a density factor in there somewhere, don’t they?).
Management of exhaled anesthetic gas would be tricky; you would have to scrub it from the air, sequester it, or vent it rather than returning it to the general air supply.
To minimize blood loss, more electrocautery could be used (on the cut setting) instead of sharp dissection. Vessels can be ligated and divided with ultrasonic ‘scissors’. On Earth you can use an argon-plasma coagulator to control bleeding over an entire raw surface; I’m not sure how that would effect a small enclosed life support system over an extended period.
The lack of gravity would have pluses and minuses wrt positioning the patient, visualizing the surgical field and keeping things retracted out of the way. Pressure sores and neuropathy from long periods of immobility might be minimized. Laparoscopic procedures would be more difficult without gravity working as a ‘free retractor’ to keep things pulled to one side. It’s hard to predict whether recovery would be easier or harder in microgravity; patients may have more ileus or atelectasis, or less. There might be more postop nausea, and nasogastric suction might not work as well to keep the stomach empty without gravity to help separate liquids from gases in the GI tract.
Under gravity, fluids in body cavities tend to pool in dependent areas and form helpful collections which can be drained with more-or-less ease if needed. Without gravity it would be more difficult to drain a pleural effusion, for example.