Not having a heartbeat and not breathing doesn’t mean you’re dead. Intensive care departments are literally full of people with medically paralysed breathing muscles (i.e. not breathing) on ventilation machines. People go onto heart/lung bypass machines everyday to have heart surgery and their heart is stopped. You just need to keep oxygenated blood going around, keeping those tissues alive till you get the heart and breathing back online (this is what CPR is trying to do).
When the brain stem is dead tissue, then you’re truly dead (but even then you can be kept “alive” artificially if you’re already on a ventilation machine in a suitable intensive care).
But they are literally dead
Not having a heartbeat and not breathing doesn’t mean you’re dead. Intensive care departments are literally full of people with medically paralysed breathing muscles (i.e. not breathing) on ventilation machines. People go onto heart/lung bypass machines everyday to have heart surgery and their heart is stopped. You just need to keep oxygenated blood going around, keeping those tissues alive till you get the heart and breathing back online (this is what CPR is trying to do).
When the brain stem is dead tissue, then you’re truly dead (but even then you can be kept “alive” artificially if you’re already on a ventilation machine in a suitable intensive care).
When your heart stops, you are considered dead no matter how viable your brain tissue is.
Source: I have pronounced many persons dead.
No it’s not. It only becomes a criteria when you can no longer reasonably be sure that it can’t be restarted.
Source: Retired medic that has pronounced my share of dead people AND restarted a few hearts also.
This is like saying your car battery isn’t dead because I’m able to jump start it.
So why do we do CPR? Why do we use AEDs? Was all the CPR I have done a waste of time?
Dead means you are going to stay that way. Dead is irreversible. And until I and/or a doctor say you are dead, you are not. You are just maybe dead.
Dead means dead if you don’t do anything about it
Thanks for pointing that out Captain Obvious. And I earned the tee shirt for needing to make that decision-- more than once.
? There seems to be some question on here.