Jacksons Hospital Is Known For Raising The Dead
Tested on a few dozen cardiac arrest patients, 80 percent survived. Usually, more than 80 percent perish.
“They took people who were basically dead, not all that different than Michael Jackson, and saved most of them,” said Dr. Lance Becker, an emergency medicine specialist at the University of Pennsylvania and an American Heart Association spokesman.
Could Jackson, too, have been saved?
Its impossible to know. Doctors at the hospital worked on him for an hour. The UCLA expert, cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Gerald Buckberg, said he was not personally involved in Jacksons treatment, and that too little is known about what preceded it.
“We have no idea when he died versus when he was found,” Buckberg said in a telephone interview.
However, the results in other patients show that “the window is wide open to new thinking” about how long people can be successfully resuscitated after their hearts quit beating, Buckberg said. “We can salvage them way beyond the current time frames that are used. Weve changed the concept of when the heart is dead permanently.”
They call it “the Lazarus syndrome” for the man the Bible says Jesus raised from the dead.
Lets be clear: No one is saying that people long dead without medical attention can be revived. The lucky ones in Buckbergs study received quick help, and the reason they suffered cardiac arrest was known and could be fixed: blocked arteries causing a heart attack, in most cases.
Buckbergs method requires:
-Prompt CPR – rhythmic chest compressions – to maintain blood pressure until the patient gets to a hospital.
-Use of a heart-lung machine to keep blood and oxygen moving through the body while doctors remedy what caused the heart to quiver or stop in the first place, such as a drug overdose or a clogged artery.
-Special procedures and medicines to gradually restore blood and oxygen flow, so a sudden gush does not cause fresh damage.
“You can save the heart and lose the brain,” Buckberg explained.
UCLA and hospitals in Birmingham, Ala.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and in Germany tested Buckbergs method on 34 patients who had been in cardiac arrest for an average of 72 minutes. All had failed resuscitation methods with standard CPR and defibrillation to try to shock their hearts back to beating.
Only seven died. Only two survivors were left with permanent neurological damage. Results were published in 2006 in the journal Resuscitation.
Dr. Constantine Athanasuleas (pronounced uh-than-uh-SOO-lee-us), a surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, treated one man in the study who had been in cardiac arrest for about an hour and a half. The mans wife, a nurse, did CPR until a helicopter brought him to the hospital.
“He was flatlined,” with a heart “as still as your dining room table,” Athanasuleas said.