OT: Hardware-to-Organism Interfaces (h2oi)

[se5a]

wasent there an experiment where they injected a guy on death row with water and it killed him?
or was that just one of those urbane miths...

[Randallw]

I don't know of the myth or not, but it would seem to me that injecting water is as bad as injecting air. It will kill you anyway.

[Aiken]

Distilled water is pretty harmless, it's often used as solvent(sp?) for injections. But if it was mineral water injected....

[Jack Simth]

It's hard to say if it is a myth or not, between the placebo effect and the note that the injection location is missing from the story. The brain controls a lot - if he truely believed he was going to die, he could have (especially as by the time many death row inmates reach the execution chamber anymore, they are old enough for heart attacks to be a serious risk). Injected into the right (wrong?) place, water could harm you - water injected into the spine (called a spinal tap) interferes with nerve function, and blocks pain. Injected into a place where it would interfere with the nerves going to the heart, and it might be able to stop a man's heart that way.

[geoschmo]

Typically lethal injection is a drug injected into the bloodstream. Injecting water, assuming it's just water with no contaminants, into the bloodstream isn't going to interfere with any nerve functions. Your blood is mostly water to begin with, the body already knows how to process it and take just what it needs from it. I suppose you could inject enough water in a short enough amount of time to dilute the blood to a point where the body can't get the things it needs to makes the cells function. If that happened your kidneys would probably fail before your heart from working overtime as one of their jobs is regulating the amount of water in your bloodstream. And I doubt it would happen in seconds or even minutes.

You could also die of internal bleeding if you thin the blood out too much. Parts of your circulatory system are wearing out and breaking all the time. The system is self-repairing and patching these tiny tears. If the blood gets too thin though it can't do this efficently. Actually this could trigger a heart attack if this occurs near the heart and the bleeding collects in the pericardial sack that surrounds it. The pressure would build and cause the heart to fail. Wouldn't happen instantly though.

If this story is true it's got to be a guy with a pre-exsisting heart ailment that was sent over the edge by the stress of the situation.

Geoschmo

[ June 16, 2004, 20:10: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Kamog]

In the Matrix, I never understood why you would die if somebody unplugged you while you were in there. I would think that being unplugged would kind of be like waking up from a dream.

[dogscoff]

n the Matrix, I never understood why you would die if somebody unplugged you while you were in there.

Because the film would have sucked otherwise :-D :-D