A New Branch of Medicine Upon Us?

It seems a bit weird that an article entitled "The new science of resuscitation is changing the way doctors think about heart attacks—and death itself" isn't making headlines beyond the front page of my f'ing Hotmail account.

For example, this article contains some quotes like this:

"...according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour (after someone had died)," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." I n fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later. But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed."

Like whoa! The article goes on to talk about various techniques being researched to take advantage of this new information. These new techniques really seem to fly in the face of conventional, professionally accepted, and, in fact, proscribed! treatments for heart attacks and the like.. treatments that have like a 20% success rate at best (feel free to comment on the validity of that fact).

That said, I'm sure it will be awhile until anything comes out of this research based upon the "actual" cause of cell death (new theory, for now: oxygen REintroduction into the body), but man, it really gets the imagination going..

A whole new branch of medicine may be upon us - one dedicated to bringing people back from the "dead", or at least the notion of "dead" that we have right now. Now, that is some sci-fi shizz if I've ever heard it. So cool. And I hope to read more about this type of science (in the NYTimes or Science or *something* beyond msnbc!); if you come across anything along the same lines, let me know.

And if that's not enough to think about - that is, the biology/medical part of the equation - we haven't even gotten to the more metaphysical questions about what it *really* means to die. But I'll leave those musings for another day..