Too late for Easter, but here is an interesting medical advance towards resurrection. When I die, please make sure that they cool me off and get me on an ECMO machine as soon as possible.
Sam Parnia MD has a highly sought after medical specialty: resurrection. His patients can be dead for several hours before they are restored to their former selves, with decades of life ahead of them.Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
Parnia is head of intensive care at the Stony Brook University Hospital in New York. If you'd had a cardiac arrest at Parnia's hospital last year and undergone resuscitation, you would have had a 33% chance of being brought back from death. In an average American hospital, that figure would have fallen to 16% and (though the data is patchy) roughly the same, or less, if your heart were to have stopped beating in a British hospital.By a conservative extrapolation, Parnia believes the relatively cheap and straightforward methods he uses to restore vital processes could save up to 40,000 American lives a year and maybe 10,000 British ones. Not surprisingly Parnia, who was trained in the UK and moved to the US in 2005, is frustrated that the medical establishment seems slow and reluctant to listen to these figures. He has written a book in the hope of spreading the word.
