Medical advances mean it will soon be possible to bring the dead back to life, a doctor claims.
Modern techniques will enable a patient to be revived up to 24 hours after they stop breathing, Dr Sam Parnia says.
The
American critical care physician, who trained in London, said: ‘We may
soon be rescuing people from death’s clutches hours, or even longer,
after they have actually died.’
Claims: Dr Sam Parnia says medical advances mean
it could soon be possible to bring people back to life 24 hours after
they stopped breathing. Dr Parnia also said he could have saved the life
of actor James Gandolfini
He claims the US actor James
Gandolfini, star of The Sopranos – who died aged 51 in Rome last month –
might have survived if he had suffered his massive heart attack in New
York.
‘I believe if he died
here, he could still be alive. We’d cool him down, pump oxygen to the
tissues, which prevents them from dying,’ Dr Parnia told Germany’s Der
Spiegel magazine. ‘Clinically dead, he could then be cared for by the
cardiologist. He would make an angiogram, find the clot, take it out,
put in a stent and we would restart the heart.’
Dr
Parnia, whose new book on resuscitation science is called Erasing
Death, said death should be reversible for many patients, providing they
are in the right place getting the right treatment.
‘Of course we can’t rescue everybody
and many people with heart attacks have other major problems,’ he said.
‘But if all the latest medical technologies and training had been
implemented, which clearly hasn’t been done, then in principle the only
people who should die and stay dead are those that have an underlying
condition that is untreatable.
‘A
heart attack is treatable. Blood loss as well. A terminal cancer isn’t,
neither are many infections with multiresistant pathogens. In these
cases, even if we’d restart the heart, it would stop again and again.
‘My
basic message: The death we commonly perceive today in 2013 is a death
that can be reversed.’ Dr Parnia, head of intensive care at the Stony
Brook University Hospital in New York, said resuscitation figures tell
their own story.
The
average resuscitation rate for cardiac arrest patients is 18 per cent in
US hospitals and 16 per cent in Britain. But at his hospital it is 33
per cent – and the rate peaked at 38 per cent earlier this year.
Eternal life: Critical care physician, Dr Sam
Parnia, said his 'revival research' is on the cusp of major
breakthroughs which will allow the dead to rise again after being dead
for some time
‘Most, but not all of our
patients, get discharged with no neurological damage whatsoever,’ he
said, adding that it is a ‘widely held misconception’ – even among
doctors – that the brain begins to suffer massive damage from oxygen
deprivation three to five minutes after the heart stops.
‘In
the past decade we have seen tremendous progress. With today’s
medicine, we can bring people back to life up to one, maybe two hours,
sometimes even longer, after their heart stopped beating and they have
thus died by circulatory failure.
‘In the future, we will likely get better at reversing death.’
The
techniques he advocates are not cryogenics – freezing the body
immediately after death – but cooling it down to best preserve brain
cells while keeping up the level of oxygen in the blood. This buys time
to fix the underlying problem and restart the heart, he claims.
He
says that if someone collapses with a heart attack, call 999 then
immediately place bags of frozen vegetables on them until the ambulance
arrives, as it helps protect the brain.
‘It
is possible that in 20 years, we may be able to restore people to life
12 hours or maybe even 24 hours after they have died.
‘You could call that resurrection, if you will. But I still call it resuscitation science.’
dailymail.co.uk
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