So yeah, during WWII Japan had this thing called "Unit 731", located in China. There, they conducted all kinds of "experiments", which was basically pure sadistic torture under a "scientific" premise. One of which, but not limited to, was watering people under below freezing temperatures to see how their bodies dealt with frostbite. Whether they actually got something from it or not, is debatable. But yeah, that happened and the meme jokes about the results of such "experiments". Peter's frozen finger, out!
A lot of what they did was pseudoscientific atrocities, but they actually did come up with a lot of information on the conditions a human being could survive and treatments to improve odds of survival and recovery. The three I'm most familiar with are on treating frostbite, decompression sickness, and chemical burns along with the importance of proper analgesia during recovery. Before their alarmingly cruel experiments the only real treatment for cold exposure, for example, was prophylactic amputation to prevent infection and gangrene from setting in. They discovered that using slower warming techniques significantly improved outcomes and often prevented the need for amputation.
It's supremely fucked up how they got the knowledge. Visiting Nazis even balked at their experiments and wrote back home to protest the cruelty of their methods. But it's definitely been extremely useful to medical science as a whole.
Uh, when cold, get heated? Surely it shouldn't need such extreme circumstances. Unless the actual cures they're talking about are more elaborate and advanced, I haven't found it yet after scrolling through the comments for an explanation on the exact cure
So the breakthrough discovery was related to how the warming happened. At the time standard treatment was a hot bath. What the Japanese discovered was that slowly warming a severely hypothermic/frostbitten person up resulted in significantly improved outcomes, and it was even more effective to heat the patient internally through warm saline infusion or surgical intervention. You couldn't really get information on the specific temperatures and warming rates without trial and error which, at the time, required testing conditions that were extremely unlikely to be encountered naturally and impossible to find in statistically significant numbers unless you were inducing the hypothermia/frostbite yourself. Not to mention that it's inherently unethical to test a treatment when you have no idea if it will be effective and a probable outcome is death or permanent disfigurement.
Honestly I don't know that they could have, especially with the technology available at the time. I don't see a way you could get results outside of trial and error on a huge number of people. You'd basically need a large population who were already suffering from frostbite that were willing to risk life and limb by undergoing experimental treatments and were right next to the facility when it happened. We have a hard enough time getting a statically significant number of people to volunteer for post surgical pain treatment studies where they aren't risking death or permanent disfigurement, and their useful enrollment window isn't a matter of minutes.
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u/Sheepzs 2d ago
So yeah, during WWII Japan had this thing called "Unit 731", located in China. There, they conducted all kinds of "experiments", which was basically pure sadistic torture under a "scientific" premise. One of which, but not limited to, was watering people under below freezing temperatures to see how their bodies dealt with frostbite. Whether they actually got something from it or not, is debatable. But yeah, that happened and the meme jokes about the results of such "experiments". Peter's frozen finger, out!