Medical What are some cases (if any) of people coming back from the dead?

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The discussion centers on cases where individuals were pronounced dead by medical professionals and later returned to life, distinct from near-death experiences or misdiagnoses of death. Participants explore the phenomenon of Lazarus Syndrome, where patients spontaneously regain vital signs after being declared dead. They reference a case from the BMJ involving a brain-dead patient who began breathing independently, highlighting the complexities of defining death, particularly in terms of brain function versus heartbeat. The conversation also touches on the ethical implications of organ donation and the evolving understanding of death as a process rather than a definitive moment. Overall, the thread seeks documented instances of true revival after a formal declaration of death, emphasizing the rarity and medical intricacies involved.
  • #31
I just found this article online today in Science:
Its probably not available to everyone, but I can't tell.

Its a long article that describes recent developments in human transplantation techniques and their impact on making living vs. non-living distinctions.

Of course with transplants you want living organs or tissues from dead people, which is kind of contradictory if using simple interpretations.

In individuals declared brain dead, organs can be recovered before life support is disconnected, as these people have already died; such machinery keeps organs oxygenated and healthy prior to transplant. But for this man the donation process would be altered: Life support had to be withdrawn for death to occur. His heart stopped, and his circulation with it.As is customary regardless of whether organs will be donated, physicians waited 5 minutes to ensure that the heart didn’t start beating again on its own. It did not, and the man was declared dead. The baton then passed to the organ recovery and transplant team. They clamped blood vessels running from the torso to the brain and reconnected his body to machines that circulated oxygenated blood, causing the heart to begin pumping again.These two interventions—initiating a heartbeat after death is declared and taking steps to prevent blood flow to the brain—are at the core of a raging debate about the ethics of such donations. To some people, the approach risks disrupting the dying process; to others, it allows that process to continue as the family desires, while also honoring individual or family wishes for organ donation.The debate touches on the definition of death, Moazami says. “When the heart stops, we say, ‘time of death, 5:20 a.m.’” But, “The fact of the matter is, death is a process. Death is not a time point.” Cells can take hours to die. Sophisticated machinery can induce a heartbeat hours after death, but does that make a person “alive”?

Screenshot 2023-05-12 at 10.41.46 AM.png


These kinds of approaches were not that uncommon when I was recovering corneas from dead people for an Oregon eye bank.
 
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  • #32
It sounds like you're asking if a miracle (by definition) has ever occurred here, OP.

Is that correct?
 

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