Pig Man!

For now. I doubt he’ll live more than a few weeks, and his death won’t appear in the news.

I know people are impressed by heroic medical efforts. I’m not. I work with technology all the time, and heroic efforts are usually attempted because, at some point in the past, someone failed to use the simple solution.

Oinks? :thinking:

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It’s also animal cruelty. The pig is raised in specific sterile conditions to keep the heart in great shape. They aren’t pulling oinkers off the farm for this type of procedure.

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I considered that, but decided against it. Well played.

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As opposed to raising them in specific conditions to keep the bacon in great shape?

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His death will almost certainly be in the news whether it’s tomorrow or 30 years from now. Always has been for similar transplant pioneers in the past. Sorry you’re too cool to be impressed. Hope you get over yourself soon.

I’m not “too cool to be impressed”. I’m just a bit more familiar with the tradeoffs of technology, and the fact that “impressive” medical procedures are invariably just a massive band-aid for something that could have been solved in a much simpler way.

The vast majority of heart transplants (and related procedures, eg, CABG, angioplasty) are done for absolutely no good reason, and they don’t even work very well. If no such procedures were available, the doctors would have to tell the patient: eat proper food and do some exercise, or you’ll be dead in 10 years. Instead, they wait for the patient to get critically ill, give him a heart transplant, and then spend the next 10 years dealing with the consequential problems (plus the original problem, which hasn’t gone away). Whereupon the patient dies regardless.

Interesting factoid: most kidney transplants are a consequence of the kidney failure that sometimes follows heart transplants.

Now it could be that this person is in dire straits through no fault of his own. But if there weren’t a long queue of people waiting for a new heart because they’ve buggered up the original, he could at least have acquired a human replacement without much trouble.

Considering all the research and effort ploughed into a pig-heart-transplant, how much of that investment might have been more productively spent on dealing with the other mundane medical issues that blight people’s lives?

No. In addition to the cruelty suffered by pigs raised for eating.

Our pigs suffered no cruelty. Good British bacon.

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