Stay Cold, Not Warm, If You Want To Cheat Death

24 year old Christine Newman was snowshoeing north of Vancouver in 2014. She was with a group but decided to head back to base camp on her own just after midnight. She was found 7 hours later just off the trail by her friends, buried up to her hairline in a tree well. Her eyes were open and she wasn’t blinking...she was unconscious, with no pulse, and her body temperature had dropped to 62 degrees by the time she was transported to a hospital...a full 9 1/2 hours after she was buried in snow.
Christine made a full recovery...From an article in this month’s Outside magazine by Rene Ebersole, ”doctors are discovering that when it comes to hypothermia, the line between life and death isn’t clear-cut. If you become severely hypothermic before your heart stops, the cold can actually become a protectant,making it possible for you to enter a state similar to suspended animation in which your metabolism slows to such a pace that your brain and organs can survive on a whisper of oxygen.

“If a victim is discovered in time, he’ll appear dead---dilated pupils, no detectable pulse, no breath---but if a rescuer knows to start CPR and get help, he might have a fighting chance.” There are many stories like this....a woman last year was skiing in Norway and fell into a frozen pond, where she lay for over an hour...her body temp went down to an incredible 57 degrees. The lowest temperature ever recorded for someone who survived. She, too, made a full recovery. This is blowing the minds of hypothermia experts. For some context, mild hypothermia begins at the 95 degree mark with the onset of uncontrollable shivering...as you dip to 90 degrees your skin grows pale, lips turn blue, and speech is slurred. When you go below 82 degrees, you have arrived at severe hypothermia and you lose consciousness.

”Death is not like falling off the edge of a cliff. It’s a much more gradual process, involving something akin to a chain reaction within the cells. “There are pathways that lead the cell toward death, and we know that when a person gets in critical condition, many of those pathways are activated,” says Becker. “So the cells begin to spiral toward death. [But] cooling slows down that death spiral.”

We know that if you’ve been under warm water for three to four minutes, you’re basically unsalvageable,” says Dr. Gordon Geisbrecht, a physiologist at the University of Manitoba in Canada. “But if you’ve fallen and slipped underneath the ice, you may survive 30 to 40 minutes of drowning. Given that the oxygen supply to the brain has stopped, a colder brain can survive a longer period of anoxia.” The brain needs much less oxygen when it is cold, the enemy is heat...even warmth...hence the popular saying in medicine: ”You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead”.

A tiny amphibian has gone another step further in cheating death through freezing. “The wood frog lives in a range from Georgia to north of the Arctic Circle. The wood frog spends weeks, even months, in a state of suspended animation, a frozen state, devoid of all vital signs, then it quickly thaws in the spring, hopping off to mate.”

In the ER, doctors have learned that chilling the body of critical patients who have suffered severe gunshot wounds an knife wounds can slow down the “dying process” and give doctors much needed time before the brain and other vital organs go through irreversible damage. This has vast life saving ramifications.

The final chapter in ”Ice Medicine” might be the controversial process of cheating death---human cryopreservation. This is the process of freezing the body of a very recently deceased individual (who has previously signed up for the cryogenic procedure) in order to preserve the body for that time in the future when restoration might be a scientific reality. More than a few people are counting on a future in which the molecular nanotechnology and other advances will be able to reverse the damage done to tissues during the freezing process, bringing frozen people back to life and curing them of whatever killed them in the first place. The process works like this:
“The Cryo company arranges to have staff on site when a client’s heart stops. Within minutes they plunge the person into an ice bath and put him on life support to minimize brain-cell death. They administer drugs to help keep the blood flowing, then circulate cryoprotectant chemicals throughout the body via an I.V.. The person is then transported to the cryogenic facility where his body is stored at -320.8 degree in a container of liquid nitrogen. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation currently has 141 people preserved in this fashion, including baseball great, Ted Williams. The cost is 200,000 per body, OR, if you want to go the cheaper route, you can just freeze your head for $80,000. The idea being that technology will reach the point where you can grow a new body....and who can say that this isn’t a good bet?

After all, immortality is the greatest metaphorical carrot of all time..it’s not even close. Given a “carrot” like that...there is no limit to man’s motivation to climb the ladder of technology.

Food for thought.....