Inflammation is the culprit in so much of what goes wrong in the human body, including congestive heart failure caused by infection, disease or defect. Researchers have invented a new machine that filters out markers in the blood caused by inflammation to try to improve heart function. The procedure, called plasmaepheresis, is still theoretical at this point. Initial efforts resulted in also filtering out other important immune response chemicals and some patients needed antibiotics after the treatments.

Well, I guess it’s one of those good ideas we discover, though the patients we use it with first are really just letting us experiment. The hope is that down the road the process can be perfected and used as a supplemental therapy to help people feel better while we work on finding more lasting solutions to the real problem that we’ll never fully get over–dying.