[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

Hi, all... as I may have mentioned earlier, I had a knee surgery scheduled for today. Just a relatively simple arthroscopy to remove and trim back a couple of very badly torn meniscii that were causing a *lot* of pain.

All went well, I'm back home and parked in front of my computer for the next three or four days.

I'm also under the influence of some pretty powerful pain meds -- oxycodone, to be specific -- and while I feel completely rational and all, and while I'm sure my posts will make as much sense as they ever did, I just wanted to give a very brief explanation in advance, just in case...

-the other Doug

[dvandorn]

There is also the whole question of performing surgery in a microgravity environment. How difficult would that be? Would microgravity make the clearing of incisions and wounds of blood and tissue significantly harder?

Would we have to develop some kind of centrifuge just to offer a G-field within which to perform sensitive medical/surgical procedures?

Seems to me that this is an area in which we could be using the ISS for really valuable research. Although, using the ISS to develop microgravity surgical techniques would have its own issues to deal with, not the least of which would be the transportation of live animals to ISS to be used as experimental guinea pigs. Live animal research is a touchy subject here in the U.S., performing it on the ISS would just raise the profile of the issue much higher than it is right now.

But, see, this is where I see ISS as a useful platform for certain types of research. It provides a habitable microgravity environment in which we can develop and test procedures that will eventually be needed by interplanetary explorers. Why not start developing that data and those capabilities *now*, and use the ISS for something approaching a useful purpose???

You could also design and test a centrifugal artificial-gravity module within ISS operations, and I don't see anyone even mentioning the concept. Seems to me it would be cheaper and easier to check out how well such things work at the ISS than it would be to just design one and fly it, untested, as part of the first major manned interplanetary expedition.

-the other Doug