X-Message-Number: 23576 Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2004 14:30:29 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: hypothermia, revised It has been pointed out to me that my statement about cold-water drowning victims omitted to clarify the important role played by circulation of the blood. Therefore my initial statement could be rewritten as: 1. They are living proof that postmortem brain damage can be delayed by hypothermia, especially if cooling occurs initially while the heart is still beating. This is an important factor because blood circulation can withdraw heat from the body and brain far more rapidly than surface cooling alone, after the circulation has stopped. This should be reassuring to members of any cryonics organization that cools the patient promptly after legal death has been pronounced, provided an ice bath is supplemented with cardiopulmonary support to sustain some circulation of the blood. In addition it was pointed out to me that controlled hypothermia experiments (which have typically used dogs) provide better evidence than anecdotal case histories about children falling into swimming pools or snow drifts. On the other hand, when one is trying to convince everyday people that life can resume after a period without any vital signs, I feel there is no substitute for reasonably well authenticated stories of children "coming back." Often I have used such stories about children as a way of evaluating the skepticism of the person to whom I am talking. If the person says, "I don't believe it, that's impossible," I know I am going to have some difficulty presenting the case for cryonics. I once talked to a biologist who refused to believe Suda's cat brain experiment even after I showed him a photocopy of the original paper in Nature. (I had obtained the photocopy from a medical library.) --Charles Platt Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23576