I assume the astronauts are healthy, thoroughly vetted by doctors, trained in basic medical principles, and have basic medical supplies on board.
But what happens if they get appendicitis or kidney stones or some other acute onset problem?
In: 2048
Something that we all should of done for an extended period of time in 2020. They quarantine.
TLDR: lots of precautions. Many things can bw treated like on earth, more invasive procedures have been proven on rats but never on humans.
There‘s a lot of things you can do before going to space to ensure health
– firstly potential astronauts are screened for risk factors, chronic diseases, etc.
– before going to space astronauts are quarantined to ensure no infectious disease is carried on-board
– astronauts are overall fit, which itself is a big factor to avoiding illnesses
– In case of the ISS there‘s always lne medical officer (educated doctor, with additional training for space medicine) on the station. I assume this would also be the case for any future missions
Precaitions aside, what actually happens when a medical problem arises?
Infectious diseases can mostly be treated like on earth with medications, more on that later. Other conditions such as blood clots van also be treated with medication (tho not fully reliably). That actually happened in 2020, tho the astronaut was kept anonymous.
Now onto the spicy part: actual physical trauma.
– many tests are either unavailable or unreliable in space. You simply don‘t have the infrasgructure of a hospital in space. Other diagnostix tests might just generally not work well in microgravity. For example a perforated stomach creates air bubbles in places where they shouldn‘t be which can be detected; without gravity the gas wouldn‘t rise the same way making it an unreliable test.
– fluids behave differently in space, causing massive problems. If you have a vein bleeding the blood won‘t flow, instead it‘ll pool around where the wound is. That means internal bleeding can cause serious problems, as the wound won‘t heal as you‘d expect on earth. Normally after an incision blood would pool in that cut and you can suck it away. In space however the blood would spurt out and fly around.
– pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetic are part of pharmacology. They are all about how medicine moves around the body and how they work. They are quite complex for an ELI5, so suffice to say that we‘re not entirely sure how differently medicines behave in microgravity. This causes problems with, for example, anasthesia.
Surgery has been performed on rats in space, proving that any surgery is feasi le in soce, as long as the patient, doctors/nurses and tools are adequately restrained.minimally invasive surgeries are far preferred over open surgeries. This is also the case on earth, but in soace it‘s even more imprtant. Just imagine a guy in space with his knee cut open – fluids would be everywhere, it‘d be quite a mess. Typically mlnimally invasive surgies is the preferred method – in soace it‘s even more important. Since open wpunds cause problems you‘d best only male small cuts through which you insert your tool.
well, if you get sent to the South Pole, which is kinda like going into space, you do your own damn appendectomy [Leonid Rogozov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Rogozov)
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Basically, their scrutiny level is so intense that it’s practically impossible. They’re quarantined to prevent anything they might catch, and the level of test and scrutiny they undergo at every step through the process is about 200 times what anyone else would endure. By the time someone is “okayed” to go to space for a basic mission, their entire medical system has been scrutinized. Someone who’s “okayed” for a long mission? Their physical has been scrutinized to the ultimate level possible. Basically, they’ve been checked, tested, scrutinized to the point that their bodies (and psychology) are essentially known thoroughly. The doc’s know how many inches of intestine they have, and there isn’t a question about their current condition that hasn’t been asked and answered fully.
Chris Hadfield’s book (which I highly recommend) And Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon both pretty well illustrate this; by the time you’re selected for flight, you’ve been gone through with the finest of fine-toothed combs, and if there’s even a teeny little unlikely thing that might maybe possibly present a potential-albeit-incredibly-unlikely problem on-flight…unpack your stuff; you aint goin’ nowhere.
Back in the Apollo days, many flyers were astounded by how intense the scrutiny was, and very few were cool with it. There was always a sense of “look what those bastards want to do to us now” in terms of medical scrutiny.
Of all the stuff that can go wrong, the gooey bags of mostly water in the control suite is least likely to be the problem. They’ve had the best medical scrutiny money can buy *hundreds of times* repeatedly asking “what could go wrong”. The only answer that’s acceptable to sign off on a pilot? “All clear- Go.”
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