Mammals are able to resemble sea cucumbers (Holothuroidea) or loach fish (Misgumus anguillicandatus) and breathe through the fifth point – literally, not figuratively. That is, they can supply the blood and internal organs with oxygen through the intestines. Japanese and American scientists have confirmed this in experiments on pigs, rats and mice.
The test animals were not allowed to breathe normally. As a rule, after 11 minutes they were “cut off”. But if the gasping for breath was blown oxygen into the fifth point – they ventilated the intestines through the anus, to put it more scientifically, then they remained viable for 50 minutes, and some for an hour.
The researchers, led by Takanori Takebe, a professor at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, were inspired by the experiments. And they promised to continue. In the near future, we were going to test the technique on people – first on healthy volunteers, and then on patients who, in one form or another, suffer from pulmonary insufficiency. That is, they themselves cannot breathe normally – through the mouth or through the nose. Especially when oxygen is received through a ventilator (ventilator) – as now in severe cases of pneumonia during the coronavirus pandemic.
As it turned out, oxygen can be supplied in a more gentle way for people – not pneumatically, but hydraulically – by means of enemas with special fluorocarbon liquids “saturated” with life-giving gas dissolved in them. For rats, for example, 1 milliliter of such an oxygen cocktail was enough to “breathe” for an hour.
Wendy L. Thompson, a gastroenterologist at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center who took part in the experiments, has little doubt that intestinal ventilation will become common practice in intensive care units – to aid mechanical ventilation, or even instead of … All that is needed is additional research to prove that the technique does not harm people. Pigs, which in their physiology are very similar to humans, and the injection of oxygen, and oxygen enemas were only beneficial. As reported by the portal EurekAlert, referring to the journal Med, in which scientists published the results of their experiments.
