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amputation
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what would happen if you slowly cut off different parts of you body including pieces of skin,at wich point would you stop functioning,could you get down to just your basic parts of the body?
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It has been theorized that a brain could continue to function, at least electrically, suspended in a solution of appropriate chemicals. There are unproven reports of persons heads that were decapitated in the French Revolution, whose eyes continued to blink and whose lips continued to move for several seconds after the event. This could have been due to involuntary nerve reflexes... but who knows for sure?
If you are talking about amputation, no you would not survive and it's all to do with shock.
Shock in the medical sense means serious metabolic and haemodynamic disturbance characterised by failure of the circulatory system to maintain what's known as "perfusion" of the vital body organs. You can think of perfusion as the passage of blood through the blood vessels of a specific organ.
Shock arises in major trauma and conditions like uncontrolled haemorrhage (following amputation) typically as a result of inadequate blood volume. This is known as hypovolaemic shock. However, other types of shock then arise as a result of the blood loss such as cardiogenic shock (loss of cardiac function) and neurogenic shock (inadequate vasomotor tone) and septic shock.
The body does try to compensate following haemorrhagic shock by various methods.These include shunting blood from the peripheral circulation by constricting arterial blood vessels, increasing the heart rate, increasing dissolved blood oxygen and increasing oxygen consumption by the tissues. However, during this time other physiological functions can readily become unmanageable by the body. These include increases in poisonous lactate levels, fluctuations in the delicate acid-base balance and increased blood carbon dioxide.
if the compensatory mechanisms I've outlined above fail to bring the hypovolaemic shock under control (as is almost always the case in severe uncontrolled haemorrhage), it virtually always results in fatality.
So technically, you could say that it's shock that kills a person with uncontrolled haemorrhage rather than the blood loss itself. Nowadays the importance of this fact and the sequence of events that happen has to be drummed into medical students - it's not easy to grasp as the tendency is to regard the blood loss as the cause of death.
Shock in the medical sense means serious metabolic and haemodynamic disturbance characterised by failure of the circulatory system to maintain what's known as "perfusion" of the vital body organs. You can think of perfusion as the passage of blood through the blood vessels of a specific organ.
Shock arises in major trauma and conditions like uncontrolled haemorrhage (following amputation) typically as a result of inadequate blood volume. This is known as hypovolaemic shock. However, other types of shock then arise as a result of the blood loss such as cardiogenic shock (loss of cardiac function) and neurogenic shock (inadequate vasomotor tone) and septic shock.
The body does try to compensate following haemorrhagic shock by various methods.These include shunting blood from the peripheral circulation by constricting arterial blood vessels, increasing the heart rate, increasing dissolved blood oxygen and increasing oxygen consumption by the tissues. However, during this time other physiological functions can readily become unmanageable by the body. These include increases in poisonous lactate levels, fluctuations in the delicate acid-base balance and increased blood carbon dioxide.
if the compensatory mechanisms I've outlined above fail to bring the hypovolaemic shock under control (as is almost always the case in severe uncontrolled haemorrhage), it virtually always results in fatality.
So technically, you could say that it's shock that kills a person with uncontrolled haemorrhage rather than the blood loss itself. Nowadays the importance of this fact and the sequence of events that happen has to be drummed into medical students - it's not easy to grasp as the tendency is to regard the blood loss as the cause of death.
i probably didnt explain my question properly,what i really meant was if you was to remove parts of the body over a period of time letting each removal and wound completely heal before the removal of another body part,slowly removing more and more of the body over a period of months or years,strange question i know.
OK, it's a macabre question, but I see what you're getting at.
Going back to amputation, the original heading of your post, given that blood loss could be stemmed by cautery etc, you could remove all four limbs one after the other. This has been done to victims of land mines etc in the past.
So then your left with the torso, head and neck. The trouble is, where do you want to go from here? Removal of large areas of skin, the body's largest organ, would lead to death in a few hours for various reasons, one of which is again shock.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "basic parts of the body". Normally "basic" refers to something of a very low or simple level - rudimentary, in other words. It's not possible to regard body parts in this way as they have unique, exclusive functions often not dependant upon other "parts". Your concept of basic body parts may not be the same as another persons and consequently, the lack or presence of them means different things to different people.
If you're talking about internal organs, that's an entirely different ball game depending on the organ. Remove the liver or kidneys and you'd be dead within a couple of hours. Remove the thyroid gland and you'll survive adequately as long as you're given daily doses of L- Thyroxine.
Going back to amputation, the original heading of your post, given that blood loss could be stemmed by cautery etc, you could remove all four limbs one after the other. This has been done to victims of land mines etc in the past.
So then your left with the torso, head and neck. The trouble is, where do you want to go from here? Removal of large areas of skin, the body's largest organ, would lead to death in a few hours for various reasons, one of which is again shock.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "basic parts of the body". Normally "basic" refers to something of a very low or simple level - rudimentary, in other words. It's not possible to regard body parts in this way as they have unique, exclusive functions often not dependant upon other "parts". Your concept of basic body parts may not be the same as another persons and consequently, the lack or presence of them means different things to different people.
If you're talking about internal organs, that's an entirely different ball game depending on the organ. Remove the liver or kidneys and you'd be dead within a couple of hours. Remove the thyroid gland and you'll survive adequately as long as you're given daily doses of L- Thyroxine.
Steven King wrote a short story called "Survivor Type" about a drug smuggling doctor who was shipwrecked on a rocky island with several kilos of heroin and a penknife. After breaking his ankle he eventually amputated his foot, using the heroin as an anaesthetic. He then ate his foot. As time went by he gradually removed more and more parts of his body and ate them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Type
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Type
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