Good info Doc, thanks!  

Very interesting technology.

One question I have is, what happens if you are awake for it ot be applied?

Would the cold hurt?

In the sources supplied, the temperature cited is 65°F.

Also, if at the end of a surgical procedure, it would be done while the patient was anesthetized, so not felt at all.

If done while awake, say after debridement of a wound, it would most likely be used in the setting of a local anesthetic. If neither anesthetized nor in the local anesthetic setting it might not be perceived at all (deep wound) or perceived as "cool".

Huh. This is truly revolutionary. You know, if it didn't have the DrJBHL Seal Of Approval, I would have called this thing out as New Age hokum from the name "harmonic cold plasma" alone!

Any idea how it works? The websites didn't go into much detail, and I'm afraid that while I'm somewhat familiar with the workings of "cold" and "cool" plasmas the biological side is beyond me.

http://patent.ipexl.com/US/8005548.html

http://medcitynews.com/2012/07/cold-plasma-startup-gets-1-million-for-anti-infection-wound-healing-device/

http://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2013052261&recNum=81&docAn=US2012055571&queryString=(IC/a61m)%20&maxRec=34521

Hope those references help a bit?

There are also references describing lattices, etc. and the Planck model...way deep stuff, if you Google/bing/duckduckgo it.

How much will it cost?

Will Health Care cover something like this if staples are the more cost effective option?

 

Interesting read, thank you

 

Nice to see that technology advances in such important fields, too.

Hopefully this can get to the trials soon so we can see some test results. Infections are killers, after all.

This could be very welcome technology on the battlefield. Wars and the damage the cause aren't going to go away but returning home with less scars to remind one of them would be a great advance.

No idea as to price, but while staples might be cheaper as a unit cost, they won't be when you consider the costs of wound infection care.

Insurance companies calculate those things when they consider coverage. Women will demand the 'scar free' edition, especially when brast or facial surgery is considered.

I doubt if it would be used much in primary battlefield care, Wiz...that's more a "stop the bleeding, replace the fluids, etc." surgery ("meatball surgery" as Hawkeye et. al. termed it). It might be different if burns are involved to render harger areas sterile. That might be an application of it. The usage will evolve, though. That's for sure. It will become important in the secondary procedures later on, also. 

Good thinking. 

 

Quite a bit, actually. Seems to me like the main thing this device does is kill infectious bacteria without doing (significant) damage to the surrounding tissue, while inducing cell division through some kind of favorable ion exchange (?). Seems like such a technology (semiradiant energy that kills microbes, but not multicellular tissue) could easily be repurposed into the Magical Science Fiction "Decontamination Field". Very cool.

I am sure those few thousands people in the world who will be rich enough to afford such treatment by the time it goes out of prototype stage will really appreciate it. 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2810192/  <-- Just to illustrate why insurance companies would want to pay for this care. It must cost tens of billions per year, or more - a cost which could be quite easily mitigated. 

Makes very good dollars and cents to use this equipment if the trials show what I think they will.

Some others:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1396613/

This alone predicts they will pay for surgeons, etc. to use the device:

http://www.hospitalinfection.org/cost_of_infection.shtml