lets say a person wants to go into coma for whatever reason for two months, he finds a shady doctor in a shady underground hospital because hospitals won’t do it
how long can the doctors safely medically induce him into coma for?
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It’s not the going in or staying in that’s the problem. It’s the coming out.
A medically induced coma consists of a sedation drip, usually a pain control drip, and then occasionally, a paralytic drip. These drips keep the patient asleep, out of pain, and paralyzed, so that they don’t move. You don’t always need the paralytic, but occasionally.
Our lungs work on a negative pressure system. Chest wall expands, air gets sucked into the lungs. In a medical coma, a patient is on a ventilator, which is a positive pressure system that pushes air into the lungs. The longer you’re on the vent, receiving positive pressure ventilations, the harder it is to come off. Your body may struggle to remember how to breathe.
Tube feeding and a foley / rectal tube will take care of nutrition and voiding. That part is the easy part really.
Loss of muscle tone is going to be an issue. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Part of why being an astronaut is so hard on the body. Muscle tone isn’t being sustained because it’s not being used.
The other issue is going to be avoiding hospital acquired infections. Hospitals are full of sick people. Sickness travels quite easily in a hospital. Pneumonia takes out lots of people on ventilators, because the bacteria gets down in their lungs and just sits there. No movement, no coughing, just laying there.
So to answer your question? Indefinitely, probably. However, there’s bound to be an upper limit where you probably couldn’t bring them back out of a coma. Modern medicine is incredible at keeping people who shouldn’t be alive, alive. The problem is, there’s no use keeping someone alive indefinitely, if they won’t have any quality of life afterwards.
ELI5: So you know how your legs fall asleep when you sit on the toilet for a long time? You can sit on the toilet forever, but the longer you sit, and the harder your legs fall asleep, the harder it is to standup afterwards. You can sit on the toilet for a really long time, but if you sit on it too long, we’re afraid that you won’t be able to stand back up, because your legs are too asleep.
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