Do FlatLiners Exist?

[Kizzi]

I once saw a film called Flatliners. They were doctors killing their collegues to see what happens to them when they die, by resurrecting their collegue so long after killing them and asking them what happened!

Does anyone know if experiments like this have happened in reality, & what were the results?

Kizzi

[infamous]

Originally Posted by Kizzi

I once saw a film called Flatliners. They were doctors killing their collegues to see what happens to them when they die, by resurrecting their collegue so long after killing them and asking them what happened!

Does anyone know if experiments like this have happened in reality, & what were the results?

Kizzi

I'm quite sure that if anyone had preformed such experiments, they would not be willing to confess the act to the athorities. These actions you describe would certainly be illegal if preformed the way you are suggesting. On the other hand, there have been many cases reported where someone has been declared clinically dead only to be later revived. Google "near death experience", I'm sure you'll obtain a wealth of information on the subject.

[MortenS]

It does not happen in the sense that happened in the movie, but there exists a surgical procedure that require the patient to be clinically dead: hypothermic cardiac arrest. It has been used under some complicated brain surgeries and operation of aneyrisms where operating normal pressurized arteries would likely kill the patient if something went wrong.


Here is one case report where such a method was used:
http://jnnp.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/72/3/394

It is also common to stop the heart, and restart it again in some types of sudden heart illness.

[UncleAl]

Uncle Al has died twice, once on an ER gurney with 40% third and second degree burns and a body temp of 94 F; again a couple days later during a nursing shift change that bestowed a double morphine push overdose atop 24/7 morphine drip.

1) Death is overrated as an experience.
2) Go for the morphine.
3) Either way, they all stand around shouting at you.

Hell is a very small room with spiders in every corner. If you've been really bad, they'll stick you in with a used car salesman or Ari Fleischer.

[Dark Mind]

Originally Posted by UncleAl

Hell is a very small room with spiders in every corner. If you've been really bad, they'll stick you in with a used car salesman or Ari Fleischer.

Died twice and still has that undying sense of sarcastic (or is it? ) cynicism that we've all grown to love ...

...Or hate .

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by Dark Mind

Died twice and still has that undying sense of sarcastic (or is it? ) cynicism that we've all grown to love ...

I'd say it certainly justifies his prideful sense of superiority! And he sure know's hell: jeez, Ari Fleisher for eternity...I can't imagine many things worse! Here's to Uncle Al, the Kiddies Pal!

Cheers,
Buffy

[alxian]

one of the women i loved most dearly "flatlined" during childbirth. she turned blue she was so long without oxygen intake. i don't know about the EKG but i'm sure she must have been braindead as well given that she clinically was declared dead.

sure there is such a thing.

the human body thus doesn't need detectable electrical activity. the spark of life can leave the body but the body can be revived with no i'll effect. the soul is not lost.

the power is tripped but the system reboots. the soul doesn't run on "RAM" or at least its non volatile. (good news for cryogenics)

[MortenS]

I doubt she was brain-dead in the legal or medical sense, alxian. If she was, we must rethink our whole practice of donating organs, as brain-death is the criteria necessary before an organ is harvested from a donor. If someone said she was brain-dead, they most likely has not gone through all the procedures necessary to diagnose brain-death.

With partial brain death, you will suffer great brain damage, and total brain death is equal to death. When physicians speak about brain death, they usually mean brain-stem death, in addition to the death of the cerebrum and cerebellum.

Brain-stem death is legal death, because if not kept alive by respirators, the body will fail to function after just a a few minutes, since respiratiory control is located in the brain-stem.

The criteria for establishing brain-stem death are very strict:
1. The patient must be in deep coma which is not due to depressant drug, metabolic or endocrine disorders or hypothermia
2. The patient must be on mechanical respiration because of absence or inadequate spontaneous respiration. blocking agents such as curare or other drugs must be excluded as a possible cause for respiratory failure.
3. A firm diagnosis of the basic pathology must be available, and must be known to be due to irremediable brain damage.
4. Diagnostic tests for brain-stem damage must be unequivovally positive. The tests should be performed by two doctors, which has experience in such matters, preferably a doctor that knows the patient together with an independedt doctor.

The clinical tests to check if the patient are brain-stem death is as follows:
a. All brain-stem reflexes are absent, with fixed pupils, unreactive to light. Corneal reflexes absent. Spinal reflexes are irrelevant in diagnosing brain-stem death.
b. Vestibulo-ocular reflex negative when ice-water is introduced into the ears
c. No motor responses in any cranial nerves on response to painful stimuli
d. No gag reflex to a cathether introduced into the larynx and trachea
e. no respiratory movements when the patient is disconnected from the ventilator. P(CO2) should be in excess of 50 mm Hg as a stimulus to breathing.
All testing should take place when body temperature is above 35 degrees Celsius.

Only if all these tests are positive can someone be declared brain dead in the legal sense.

EEG, cerebral angiography and cerebral blood flow measurements can be performed in addition, but it will not give any more info than the clinical tests above. It will give some results on a graph, or a picture, and may be considered as objective documentation.

[MsShadowDancer]

I will agree with Infamous. I know they purposefully do it for several surgeries and very few repercussions. There have recently been cases in the news reporting people who upon drowning in very cold water and having minimal blood flow being warmed and recovering-yes, from drowning, which is death last I checked. The future has immense potential with recent breakthroughs.

thx

[CraigD]

Many years ago, around the same time that movies like Flatliners were springing from the from the zeitgeist, I found myself in a job that had me hanging out socially with a lot of emergency room docs and nurses. The discussion turned often to near-death experiences.

One of the most common reported NDEs is “floating up out of my body, looking down, seeing the doctors and nurses working on my body, etc.”, usually called an out-of-body experience. Opinions as to weather reports of OBEs were fabrications, hallucinations, or actual perception, varied (Surprisingly, medical folk in my experience consist of about the same mix of superstitious and non-superstitious people as the general population). Every ER in this hospital had the same piece of equipment, a movable cart with various stuff on it, and a broad, flat top about 180 cm from the floor, with a small metal lip around it. I that I write a 3-digit number on a 3x5” card in thick black felt tip pen, and place the card face up on each cart top. After a resuscitation, any doc in on our scheme would casually interview the patient, and not if they noticed the card and the number on it. If the patient could read the number, or even notice that a card with something written on it in black was there, we’d have a “hit”, indicating that OBEs are objectively real perceptions. Everybody (at the time) agreed, and I did it.

It was a busy next few weeks, and our unofficial project actually gathered several “rising, floating, looking” OBE reports. Fortunately, nobody engaged in any successful cheating, such as reading the card and fabricating a “hit”. All reports were negative.

Despite everybody’s agreement to keep our experiment a secret, after a few weeks, word made its way to the hospital’s ethicist, putting a sudden and legally scary end to it. Fortunately, the worst anyone got was a stern private talking-to and a collection of ominous threats, one of them specifically admonishing me never to speak or publish anything about the whole affair, even after anonomyzing the specifics, which is exactly what I’m doing here.

Thus ended my first and only try for the Randi Foundation’s $1,000,000.