08-29-2024, 11:14 AM
According to Sam Parnia, associate professor of medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, “what we believe about death is fundamentally wrong”. It is not the end, he says, but a “reversible state”.
“If we remove that social label that makes us think everything stops, and look at it objectively, it’s basically an injury process” – one that, he believes, can be treated. "
Brains remain “salvageable for not only hours, but possibly days of time”. In one case, brain cells were found to retain full function 48 hours after being removed from a person’s body – in spite of simply ice being used to preserve the organ melting.
His team are the only ones in the world to be giving patients cocktails of drugs similar to those proven to successfully preserve pig organs following CPR, which have “significantly improved survival”.
He points to the case of a British woman who developed hypothermia while hiking in Spain in 2019, whose heart stopped for six hours while rescue teams tried to locate her. “That’s way past what we consider dead for humans,” Parnia says. Yet after being flown to a specialist centre with an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine (ECMO, which takes on the function of the heart and lungs when the body is unable to do so), she was revived.
Parnia doesn’t believe everyone who dies needs to be brought back – someone with multiple organ failure is obviously an unsuitable candidate for life-extension. But of the many “heartbreaking” cases of people who die while in otherwise good health (Parnia cites a young mother stabbed to death in a Sydney mall attack earlier this year, or those killed in war), we are giving up too soon. “You just need someone to go to the operating room, find where the laceration was, stitch it together, and put blood back into your body again,” he says. Those who die while “otherwise young, who are otherwise healthy – those people are all potentially salvageable”.
https://archive.is/eYFpi
“If we remove that social label that makes us think everything stops, and look at it objectively, it’s basically an injury process” – one that, he believes, can be treated. "
Brains remain “salvageable for not only hours, but possibly days of time”. In one case, brain cells were found to retain full function 48 hours after being removed from a person’s body – in spite of simply ice being used to preserve the organ melting.
His team are the only ones in the world to be giving patients cocktails of drugs similar to those proven to successfully preserve pig organs following CPR, which have “significantly improved survival”.
He points to the case of a British woman who developed hypothermia while hiking in Spain in 2019, whose heart stopped for six hours while rescue teams tried to locate her. “That’s way past what we consider dead for humans,” Parnia says. Yet after being flown to a specialist centre with an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine (ECMO, which takes on the function of the heart and lungs when the body is unable to do so), she was revived.
Parnia doesn’t believe everyone who dies needs to be brought back – someone with multiple organ failure is obviously an unsuitable candidate for life-extension. But of the many “heartbreaking” cases of people who die while in otherwise good health (Parnia cites a young mother stabbed to death in a Sydney mall attack earlier this year, or those killed in war), we are giving up too soon. “You just need someone to go to the operating room, find where the laceration was, stitch it together, and put blood back into your body again,” he says. Those who die while “otherwise young, who are otherwise healthy – those people are all potentially salvageable”.
https://archive.is/eYFpi
