A leading expert on near-death experiences argues that a stopped heart no longer means the end, thanks to modern medical advances that allow patients to brave death.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Sam Parnia, associate professor of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, emphasized that the medical community remains largely outdated in its understanding of death and dying.
Parnia cited recent studies, including those conducted in his own lab at NYU, that suggest the human brain can be saved after death for “not just hours, but possibly days.”
A remarkable study from the Parnia Lab last year found that some cardiac arrest patients retained memories of their death experiences for up to an hour after their hearts stopped.
Furthermore, brain activity in these patients indicated a similar phenomenon. Remarkably, in 40 percent of these cases, brain activity returned to normal or near normal levels within an hour after cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
These findings, along with other studies such as a Yale experiment in which decapitated pig brains were revived for up to fourteen hours after decapitation, led Parnia to question the idea that death is an irreversible state. He described death as “simply a social convention that does not correspond to scientific reality.”
“If we remove that social label that makes us think everything stops, and look at it objectively, [death is] actually an injury process,” says Parnia told The Telegraph.
According to Parnia, this process can be reversed not only through the use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machines (ECMO), which function as a replacement for the heart and lungs, but also through specific drug combinations that have shown promise in reviving animals.
Parnia revealed that his team may be the only one in the world administering these so-called ‘CPR cocktails’ – a mixture of epinephrine, the diabetes drug metformin, vitamin C, the antidiuretic vasopressin and the fatigue supplement Sulbutiamine – to patients in cardiac arrest. an attempt to bring them back to life.
The 52-year-old doctor is confident in his methods and begins telling people that, given his age and gender, he will likely “go into cardiac arrest soon,” and that death should not be inevitable with interventions like ECMO and CPR. cocktails available.
“If I have a heart attack and die tomorrow, why should I stay dead?” Parnia asked the newspaper. “That is no longer necessary.”
Although Parnia’s vision of revival after death depends heavily on precise timing, he hopes that society will one day view death not as a final limit, but as a condition that will emerge in its immediate aftermath – and possibly even beyond – can be reversed.
