Resuscitation specialist Sam Parnia of the State University of New York Medical Center at Stony Brook (USA) has published The Lazarus Effect, which states that we could bring many more people back to life because it just a matter of equipment and training of specialists.
First of all, let's understand the terms. Can cardiac arrest be considered death? From the point of view of medicine, the scientist writes, death is a biological process, but from the point of view of the layman, it is a point after which there is no return. There is an opinion in society that the moments of cardiac arrest and death coincide, but this is not so. In other words, a person who was brought back to life after death, strictly speaking, did not die.
The key is to have time to reverse the dying process before too many cells are damaged. We can say that after a cardiac arrest, each cell will face its own little death. After eight hours it is impossible to make the brain work again, but after four or even five hours, the "corpse" can be reanimated.
Mr. Parnia believes that the best technique is the one used in Japan and South Korea. It's called ECPR. CPR stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (cardiopulmonary resuscitation, that is, artificial respiration and indirect heart massage), and behind the letter E lies extra corporeal membrane oxygenation (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, ECMO). In a person who has survived cardiac arrest, the circulation and saturation of blood with blood oxygen is carried out through a special device - a membrane oxygenator. This allows you to bring the "deceased" back to life even seven hours after death. In the West, this technology is still very rare.
Mr. Parnia describes the ideal resuscitation process this way. First, the patient must be connected to a closed heart massage machine and artificial respiration, as well as to a device that monitors the quality of oxygen entering the brain. If at the same time the person is given the right drugs, but the oxygen content has not returned to normal, he will have to resort to ECMO. This system restores normal oxygen levels in the brain and delivers the right amount of oxygen to all organs in order to minimize cell damage.
At the same time, the patient's body should be cooled in order to reduce metabolic activity in brain cells and stop the process of their death, while doctors are looking for the cause of cardiac arrest. This is done using gel pouches that, when attached to a temperature regulator, are tied to the torso and legs. Once the body has reached the desired temperature, it is maintained throughout the day. Another way is to insert a catheter into your groin or neck and cool the blood through it.
Thus, it will be possible to cool the heart and other tissues, but what about the brain? Recently, another method has appeared - cooling through the nose, where cold steam is pumped specifically in order to cool the brain first of all, before the rest of the body.
But do not flatter yourself. If your heart stops, you almost certainly get none of it. In different hospitals, different specialists use completely different methods, and they are far from ideal. The fact is that, unfortunately, as noted by Mr. Parnia, the study of death (more precisely, the processes in the body after cardiac arrest) was the last thing science took up. And only very recently I began to seriously listen to people who have experienced the so-called near-death experience, that is, who saw the light at the end of the tunnel, etc.
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When a person suffering from depression see a doctor, the doctor does not say, “This is an illusion. Stop. Now I will tell you what is really happening. But when the patient tries to retell his visions to the doctor, he is simply dismissed. (We add from ourselves that this is understandable: without having reliable methods, science is cautious in studying the work of consciousness, leaving them to philosophy.) Mr. Parnia emphasizes: whether it is hallucinations or not, it is necessary to find out what processes in the brain lead to their appearance. Usually they say: oh, well, it's just the brain behaving strangely. A scientist who respects himself (and science) will never allow himself to make such a statement.
Mr. Parnia is one of those who do not shy away from such research. On the uppermost shelves of 25 hospitals (with an average of 500 beds each), he and his colleagues put up pictures that can only be seen hanging from the ceiling. Placing 12,500 images is too much work, so we chose the wards that often find patients with cardiac arrest. Alas, the researchers are not yet lucky: only two of those who, after resuscitation, told about the ascension above the mortal world, lay in the wards with pictures. But they did not notice them.
Our hero is clearly fascinated by the phenomenon of death. Imagine: your heart stopped and, in common parlance, you died. But some time passes, and thanks to the efforts of doctors, you return to life, as if you had just survived an operation under general anesthesia. From this it is impossible not to conclude that consciousness (more precisely, the mechanism that ensures its existence) does not disappear immediately after death. Moreover, it does not always go into hibernation, but instead continues to accumulate experience: the vision of leaving the body after death is absolutely real for the person who survived it. How long does human nature continue to live?
And then, Mr. Parnia draws attention to the fact that people who have survived the near-death experience, for the most part, talk about very pleasant impressions and even cease to fear death from now on. Perhaps there are some mechanisms at work that calm the dying person. But why does nature need them? What is their evolutionary meaning if the individual will disappear irreversibly in a matter of hours? Maybe this is part of the organism's struggle for existence while waiting for the resuscitator?