Moorhead, Concordia grad to speak about life support technologies
What happens when the heart or lungs can no longer sustain life and contemporary medical interventions temporarily take over their work?
Dr. Troy Seelhammer '05, an expert physician in critical care and extracorporeal life support, will explore how technologies such as ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) can fundamentally alter the limits of human physiology in “Rewriting the Rules of Human Physiology: How Extracorporeal Life Support Replaces the Heart and Lungs.”
The public is invited to attend the Fuglestad Memorial Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, in the Centrum at the Knutson Campus Center. The event is free. It will also be livestreamed at ConcordiaCollege.edu/Streaming.
Beginning with the familiar principles of circulation, oxygen delivery, and gas exchange, the talk will show how clinicians can move these essential functions outside the body, replacing the work of the heart and lungs while creating time for recovery, treatment, or difficult decisions.
Through clinical examples and accessible physiology, the audience will see how concepts learned in biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering converge at the bedside. The lecture will also examine the remarkable possibilities, and the profound human and ethical questions, that arise when modern medicine can sustain life in ways once thought impossible.
Designed for students and faculty across the sciences, health professions, and engineering, the lecture offers a compelling look at what happens when technology does more than support human physiology: it rewrites its rules.
Seelhammer, a Moorhead High School and Concordia College graduate, is an anesthesiologist and associate professor of anesthesiology with the Mayo Clinic.
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