Science is a set of laws that determine how the world works, right? Scientists and researchers recognize patterns in certain occurrences or behaviours, then they conduct tests and prove that it will follow a fixed set of rules. For example, gravity. The bigger the mass of an object, the more gravity it has. The moon revolves around the earth, everything ultimately revolves around the sun. It just does, and no one argues with the fact (now, at least.)
For me, the supernatural is something that we just haven't figured out yet...patterns we haven't recognized and proven yet.
So, recently, there was a man in Penang who woke up roughly 2 hours after being declared 'dead' at a hospital. His heart failed, no pulse, no heartbeat, no breathing - no signs of life.
And yet, after repeated failures at resuscitating him, his heart managed to restart itself and start pumping again after being 'dead.' And he is still alive, and will hopefully make a full recovery. Remarkable as it sounds. I found that it was not the first of its kind in medical history.
Over the years, an estimated 30 cases of Lazarus Syndrome has been officially documented. Lazarus Syndrome is where a person's circulation returns spontaneously after failed attempts to resuscitate the body.
A woman started breathing in a morgue after being 'dead' for 6 hours. The nurse who discovered her panicked and called a doctor. The woman has made a complete recovery since then, though all of her organs were said to have failed.
This reminds me of how we humans practised medicine centuries ago. It was said that it wasn't uncommon to find someone buried alive as people were falsely led to believe that they were dead. I've read stories of gravediggers who were spooked by weird scratching and rapping noises coming from the coffins they were about to bury. Alarmed, they opened up the coffins and found people inside panicking and disoriented but very much alive.
I guess as far as doctors back then were concerned, if the patient was no longer responding, they were dead. They didn't know how to check a patient's pulse to see if blood was still circulating or not. Poor people. Imagine fainting and regaining consciousness in a big black box, and hearing people above you crying and feeling the dull thump of earth being piled onto your coffin.
God save you if you're Asian and were being cremated.
Anyway, what I'm wondering now is whether we are burying or burning people alive. O__O There's a rigid set of procedures doctors have to follow to declare a patient medically dead, including testing pupil dilation, gag reflex and many other tests.
But these 30 or so people have proved that that set of rules doesn't work all the time. They are only a tiny percentage of 'deaths,' but even one exception is enough to break the rule. Unless all those patients' doctors were negligent and didn't follow protocol.
What if, one day, science proves that our body can go into a self-induced stasis in which we can undergo critical recovery. Our heart, brain and other vital organs simply shut down and stop working.
...but what if it was only temporary?
As these people have proven, these criteria to prove that someone is clinically dead may be flawed.
They said we cannot survive without water for a week, yet a Japanese hiker lost on a snowy mountain was found alive after 24 days, in a state of deep hibernation. He went without food and water for more than 3 weeks and made a full recovery. It was as if his body just decided to PAUSE until the dangerous circumstances were overcome and resumed as if nothing happened after that. They interviewed the survivor and he said the last thing he remembered was falling asleep on a sunny patch of land, waiting for someone to find him.
Science is always changing. What was true 500 years ago doesn't apply now. We are constantly discovering new things.
Maybe a hundred years from now, we will discover a new vital sign that tells us that someone is still alive, just hibernating and recuperating for the moment - like how doctors discovered our pulse and other bodily reflexes years ago.
And then the future generations will think back in horror, as we did about our forefathers who buried unconscious people alive - how many people have we killed unknowingly?
Oh, the horror. :'(
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