X-Message-Number: 21316 Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2003 02:34:16 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: various CI/Alcor issues References: <> John de Rivaz: > How Big is CI? > and find your answer as of September 2002 to be "mid-400s" I have been very impressed by David Pascal's ability to find new members for CI. The trouble is, "member" doesn't mean the same thing at CI as it means at Alcor (or used to mean at CryoCare). CI has "members" who made their onetime payment and may or may not still be interested in the organization. I hope David will correct me if I am wrong in saying that there is no ongoing attempt to verify the existence of all CI members. Other cryonics organizations historically have charged dues. If the member doesn't pay his dues, sooner or later he is removed from the list. Thus it is hard to know how to compare the CI numbers with those of other organizations, past and present. Of course it is conceivable that all the people who joined CI with a one-time payment are still members; but we just don't know. Or at least, I don't. Bob Ettinger writes: > It will usually take at least a full day after notification to get > the team to the patient, even if the patient is already a member with all > paperwork and funding in place. Apparently Bob hasn't been reading Alcor News (www.alcornews.org). If he had, he would have seen that in our case in December, standby team members reached the patient within less than an hour. In the case last Monday, team members were setting up equipment at the mortuary within 3 hours, while the patient was collected about 4 hours after cardiac arrest. Note: Both of these cases were totally unexpected and allowed no preparation time whatsoever. Last year we had a local case, which still entailed a short standby until the moment of arrest. I was beside the patient when he stopped breathing. One could say the response time in this case was zero. In Houston last year we deployed a huge amount of equipment about 12 hours after being summoned, and I was visiting the patient while the rest of the team were fitting out a cargo van as a makeshift ambulance. It is grossly misleading and almost defamatory to say that our response time is at least 24 hours. Moreover, since the whole idea of a standby is to be present at the time of legal death, and since this goal is usually achieved, the initial response time is irrelevant. The important issue is whether people who know what to do are available to do it when the patient is pronounced. Since Alcor currently has a fulltime paramedic on staff, an RN who works for us part time and is available for all cases at a moment's notice, half-a-dozen very well trained standby team members in California, other standby team members with varying experience in other states, a former director of suspension services (Tanya Jones) who participated in two cases last year, plus myself and the people at Suspended Animation, and a pool of 12 Phoenix paramedics who are on call for us, our standby capability has never been better. Tomorrow we will begin a 6-day training course which will be attended by more than 25 people, and I hope this will yield still more standby team members. > CI's policy is to try to make the widest options available to its members. If > a member wants someone else to do the initial preparation, our contract > allows that. But this has been done in how many cases? One, or more than one? > 2. Funeral Directors--Randy suggests they may be unreliable and unethical, > with no motivation for timely and effective response. I don't think this is what Randy said. I think it is an exaggeration of what he said. Personally I find that funeral directors are almost always very helpful, very interested in cryonics, willing to cooperate, but they seldom share our sense of urgency. This is understandable: They spend their entire professional lives dealing with people who are no longer alive. > circumstances, but in our experience the local mortician washout/perfusion > option is often the best. I believe the washout is done with Ringer's solution. > Next best, circumstances permitting, is for the > local mortician to start cool-down and related steps I assume this means surface cooling. So far as I know, CI does not have any kind of transportable perfusion kit containing a heat exchanger. Therefore it cannot cool the patient via femoral bypass. Unfortunately surface cooling is not very efficient. The above statements should not be seen as an attack on another organization. They were prompted by Bob's remarks, some of which were uninformed or untrue. The core of the matter is that CI offers a service which costs a fraction of the amount that Alcor charges. This price differential is a big selling point. On the other hand, at such a low price, obviously the organization cannot afford (for instance) to pay paramedics to do standbys. Why not admit that this is a simple matter of economics, instead of trying to pretend that standbys are unnecessary? --Charles Platt Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21316