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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Famous case in Brazil: in 1998 a surgeon used cyanoacrylate glue on the heart of a patient: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fol/geral/gx055168.htm

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Cyanoacrylate also bonds with proteins. It's a commonly used topical hemostatic and adhesive. It's usually for relatively dry and clean skin incisions but I certainly understand their attempt to use it in open surgery if things got desperate enough.

Using cyanoacrylate glue is is very common in medicine for skin closure. Doesn’t seem ridiculous to use in other settings.

The point is that most surgeons today would not pull that off, as if it goes wrong their career might end abruptly.

The patient, on the other hand, dies after “attempting all the standard procedures” and nobody is at fault.

I think it was not known at that time. The surgeon asked the nurse to go out of the hospital to buy the glue.

It was well known for quite some time before that.

US Combat Medics used it in the field in Vietnam in the '70s.

In the US a medical formulation was not approved until 1998, but as the sibling notes it was used in the Vietnam War by US medics. Medical studies in the 1980s showed it to be superior to stitches [1]

Cyanoacrylate is just (a very - the most? - common form of) superglue, but the medical formulations were tweaked to be less harmful to skin among other benefits.

There is also VetBond, which is similarly n-Butyl cyanoacrylate as are some medical-grade superglues, but it is only approved for animal use and thus available without a prescription (despite being chemically identical to somemedically approved glues).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate#Medical_and_vete...

First I heard of it was when my kid was rushed to hospital from kindergarten for a cut above hos eyebrow (where his best friend had thrown a toy car at him, probably in a tiff about who'd get to play with it) in ~2006-7. It was a funny colour, a bright light purple; I presume for better visibility (in contrast to most normal human skin colours) both at application and afterwards. Faded away after a few days IIRC; can't recall any return visit to check on it.

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