Nov 21, 2016
In Critical Care we deal with death on a regular basis and although
it seems an ‘on or off’ issue where you are either dead or you are
not, nothing is more true. Not only physicians but scientists,
philosophers, writers and theologians have been debating about the
subject for as long as we have become aware of the concept of
death.
To try to create order from chaos I divide the deceased in 5
categories:
The soon to be dead,
The reversibly dead,
The irreversibly dead
The walking dead (although this group I will leave to Hollywood to
educate us about)
and the most curious group
The reversibly, irreversibly dead.
They are the patients of whom we think they are irreversibly dead,
we stop our resuscitation efforts, and then they have return of
spontaneous circulation. This is known as the Lazarus phenomenon
and although many case reports have been published about this
phenomenon over the years, presumably it’s only the tip of the
iceberg.
In providing Critical Care we sometimes need to make immediate
decisions on who’s dead and who’s not. Yet decisions about whether
further treatment of patients is futile or not can only be made
when one is aware of the limits of extremes in physiology that are
survivable. Although not every patient should be treated up to
these physiological limits, knowing these extremes can help in
making an informed decision of whether to continue
treatment.