Not having a heartbeat and not breathing doesn’t mean you’re dead. Intensive care departments are literally full of people with medically paralysed breathing muscles (i.e. not breathing) on ventilation machines. People go onto heart/lung bypass machines everyday to have heart surgery and their heart is stopped. You just need to keep oxygenated blood going around, keeping those tissues alive till you get the heart and breathing back online (this is what CPR is trying to do).
When the brain stem is dead tissue, then you’re truly dead (but even then you can be kept “alive” artificially if you’re already on a ventilation machine in a suitable intensive care).
As an old and retired medic, the lack of respiration and pulse doesn’t mean you are dead-dead. On the scale of "Not Dead to Dead-Dead, a lack of respiration’s and pulse means you are at the maybe dead on the line. And other factors will make the final determination about if you are actually dead or not.
The first determining factor in figuring out where the patient is on the scale, is if you make it into my amp-a-lamps or not. If you do, you are alive at least for a little while longer and I’mma let the doctor sort it all out for you. If you don’t make it in the back of my bus, then you are dead-dead and nothing can change that-- not even god himself.
For all the times I have done CPR or those times I have to deal with a major trauma, never once did I see Jesus there waiting to take a turn at chest compressions, I never once saw the Holy Ghost crawl into an upside down car wreak with me, and God sure as hell was not there when I had to scale up out of that 20ft deep drainage ditch and had to explain to a Mother that her 11 year old son was dead under that 4-wheeler and there was nothing anyone could do to fix that.
But they are literally dead
Dead is more of a legal than a biological definition nowadays. There’s definitely some leeway.
Not having a heartbeat and not breathing doesn’t mean you’re dead. Intensive care departments are literally full of people with medically paralysed breathing muscles (i.e. not breathing) on ventilation machines. People go onto heart/lung bypass machines everyday to have heart surgery and their heart is stopped. You just need to keep oxygenated blood going around, keeping those tissues alive till you get the heart and breathing back online (this is what CPR is trying to do).
When the brain stem is dead tissue, then you’re truly dead (but even then you can be kept “alive” artificially if you’re already on a ventilation machine in a suitable intensive care).
When your heart stops, you are considered dead no matter how viable your brain tissue is.
Source: I have pronounced many persons dead.
No it’s not. It only becomes a criteria when you can no longer reasonably be sure that it can’t be restarted.
Source: Retired medic that has pronounced my share of dead people AND restarted a few hearts also.
This is like saying your car battery isn’t dead because I’m able to jump start it.
So why do we do CPR? Why do we use AEDs? Was all the CPR I have done a waste of time?
Dead means you are going to stay that way. Dead is irreversible. And until I and/or a doctor say you are dead, you are not. You are just maybe dead.
Dead means dead if you don’t do anything about it
Thanks for pointing that out Captain Obvious. And I earned the tee shirt for needing to make that decision-- more than once.
? There seems to be some question on here.
As an old and retired medic, the lack of respiration and pulse doesn’t mean you are dead-dead. On the scale of "Not Dead to Dead-Dead, a lack of respiration’s and pulse means you are at the maybe dead on the line. And other factors will make the final determination about if you are actually dead or not.
The first determining factor in figuring out where the patient is on the scale, is if you make it into my amp-a-lamps or not. If you do, you are alive at least for a little while longer and I’mma let the doctor sort it all out for you. If you don’t make it in the back of my bus, then you are dead-dead and nothing can change that-- not even god himself.
Jesus would like a word with you.
For all the times I have done CPR or those times I have to deal with a major trauma, never once did I see Jesus there waiting to take a turn at chest compressions, I never once saw the Holy Ghost crawl into an upside down car wreak with me, and God sure as hell was not there when I had to scale up out of that 20ft deep drainage ditch and had to explain to a Mother that her 11 year old son was dead under that 4-wheeler and there was nothing anyone could do to fix that.
God ain’t never had anything to do with it.