What it’s like to die

EDIT: By sheer coincidence I found my stat about CPR while commenting on another thread. http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die...

The stats on Detroit emergency responders are utterly embarrassing. You pretty much can't count on police, fire or EMT even if you had a gunshot wound in a burning house and the shooter was still there.

So I'm guessing the issue in Detroit is less about technique and more about no access to trained responders.

*And to be clear, I'm not blaming the emergency responders in Detroit for the problem. The city is huge and spread out so it takes a long time to get to the scene, there's no funding for additional outposts or training, and the jobs are dangerous making them unattractive to people with other options, and there's a higher than average amount of serious crime and emergencies.

Perhaps a trained medical professional will correct me, but I've worked closely with the technology for years and I don't believe this is accurate. An AED can indeed bring someone back to consciousness if the shock is successful. If it isn't successful, then it wouldn't affect the efficacy of CPR one way or the other.

The rest of your comment seems spot on.

I heard this years ago, and both times that I took CPR certification classes since then, we did mouth-to-mouth anyway. I guess different courses are different.

That's only for bystanders for the reason you cite (reluctance to give aid). Rescue breaths are helpful and those of us who have to respond for our employer still give them. I carry around a barrier mask all the time now.

Source: I have the HCP level CPR cert.

I recall seeing that it is almost as effective as the "legacy" CPR rescue breaths.

It's honestly super easy to remember, and I'll feel comfortable performing it if I find myself in that situation.

Statistic is true, but to say it is because of those things would requite some further analysis. Given confounding factors I don't think you can make that claim.

Seattle has an obesity rate of 22.5%, compared with 35.7% nationwide, and 33.1% in Detroit. Obesity is a major risk factor for cardiac arrest.

Seattle is also extremely white for a large American city, 67.1%, versus a place like Detroit which is 82.7% African American. Black American's have significantly higher incidences of hypertension and cardiac disease than White Americans, both for reasons that seem to have some unrealiable relations to genetic heritage but more significantly due to social stressors related to racism and overrepresentation of poverty.

Speaking of economics, Seattle has a median household income of $45k, while Detroit has a median household income of $26k. Cardiac Arrest risk factors are greatly exacerbated in the United States by poverty.

I don't deny the importance of instituting up-to-date protocols for Emergency health personnel, broad equipment supply, and widespread lay education. But to give them all the credit is to ignore Seattle's many advantages, and Detroit's many other sufferings.

The survival rates are:

CPR by a bystander: 4%

Cardiocerebral Resuscitation (i.e., chest compressions only without artificial respiration): 6%

No bystander CPR: 2%

So attempting CPR results on average in doubling the survival rate as opposed to just waiting for an ambulance, and chest compressions only are 50% better than chest compressions plus mouth-to-mouth.

If you can do that, you're already a success in my book.

There's clinical death, which the author of TFA very likely did experience. If VF continues for anything longer than a few seconds, asystole frequently occurs. Among other things, asystole is definitive of "clinical death."

On the other hand, there's death death. This is the one where we bury you and mourn you and so-on.

Yes, they're very much not the same thing. Yes, the author is probably equivocating between them, at least a little. But no, his describing what he experienced as "death" is not hyperbolic — at least not according to the clinical definition.

10 seconds may be the difference between life and death, but it's also only 10 seconds. You can pick up and lose 10 seconds quite easily. If they drove from 1 mile away, 10 seconds is the difference between 35 and 40 mph, or 60 and 70 mph. They could have saved 50 seconds if they drove 70 instead of 35; should they have?

10 seconds can be the difference between life and death, but sometimes it's not. In this case, the temporarily deceased waited an extra 10 seconds an came through it with no lasting damage at all. I'm hoping that someone, somewhere did the math on this, and determined that haste causes more problems -- either when an EMT trips and falls and injures himself, or when an EMT trips and falls and ends up taking twice as long to reach the injured person anyway, or when the EMT rushes to the injured patient and forgets the AED in the ambulance, or when the EMT administers the wrong treatment in his haste -- than it solves.

Granted, if my loved one died 10 seconds before the EMTs arrived, I might have some lingering anger, and if I died while watching EMTs slowly, nonchalantly walk towards me, my dying thought might be "Fuuuuuuuck yoooooooou EMTs", but from the perspective of a detached observer it makes perfect sense.

http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/emergency_response/common_misconcep... (escape panic is rare; disaster shock is rare and short lived; public reaction to disasters is adaptive but might overwhelm unprepared public agencies expecting to be in control)

Edit: As for walking in general, it could also be because they wouldn't want a crowd to form which could obstruct them should they need to evacuate you more quickly.

T(walking_now) + T(walking_later) < T(running_now) + T(moving_through_crowd_later)

(Source: I was a certified EMT-Basic)

What does it mean to die if I upload your brain and make another process of yourself? Is death related to the body or losing consciousness?

Well, that mostly depends on how you've defined "to die". I can easily imagine that the neo-Victorian Phyle will pass a law banning brain-copying after clinical death as an abomination, for instance. The thing about playing God is that you have to start writing your own rules.

Assuming that something we will retroactively refer to as singlulary ever occurs, and that we are close to singluarity, and that it ever takes a form which leads to some kind of ubiquitous 'upload' of a brain model that somehow acts and reacts as a brain in a skull in meatspace would (and all of these qualifiers are debatable,) you still die.

In the future the notion of what it means to be alive, and human, and dead, may be reinterpreted so that these models are considered to be, essentially, the same being as their original. But this redefinition would be semantics. Nothing frees you from the absolute and irrevocable nature of your death, in this or any other universe, ever. The post-singularity upload is still a copy, however good, and at this point the analogy of copying minds as software breaks down, because the mind isn't separate from the brain, and whether or not there's an entity on the wires which believes itself to be you, you are still no less dead.