What is clinical death?

Since ancient times, people have been interested in the question of what is clinical death. Her invariable attributed to irrefutable evidence of the existence of the afterlife, because even people far from religion have involuntarily begun to believe that life will not end after death.

In fact, clinical death is nothing but a borderline between life and death, when a person can still be returned if resuscitation is carried out within three to four, and in some cases, five to six minutes. In this state the human body almost completely stops working. The heart stops, the breath disappears, roughly speaking, the human body is dead, it shows no signs of life. It is interesting that oxygen starvation caused by clinical death does not lead to irreversible consequences, as it happens in other cases.

Clinical death is characterized by the following symptoms: asystole, apnea and coma. These signs refer to the initial stage of clinical death. These signs are very important for successful care, because the sooner a clinical death is identified, the higher the chance of saving a person's life.

Symptoms of asystole can be determined by palpation of the pulse on the carotid arteries (it will be absent). Apnea is characterized by a complete cessation of respiratory movements (the chest becomes immobile). And in a state of coma, a person completely lacks consciousness, pupils dilate and do not react to light.

Clinical death. Effects

The outcome of this difficult state depends directly on the rate at which a person returns to life. Like any other terminal condition, clinical death has its own specific consequences. Here everything depends on the speed of resuscitation. If a person can be brought back to life in less than three minutes, the degenerative processes in the brain will not have time to begin, that is, we can say that serious consequences will not occur. But if the resuscitation is delayed, then the hypoxic effect on the brain can be irreversible, up to the complete loss of human mental functions. To ensure that hypoxic changes remain reversible for as long as possible, the body cooling method is used. This allows you to extend the "reversible" period by a few minutes.

Causes of clinical death

There are many reasons why a person can be on the verge of life and death. Most often, clinical death is a consequence of exacerbation of severe diseases, in which there is a cardiac arrest and discontinuation of the lungs. This causes a state of hypoxia, which, acting on the brain, leads to a loss of consciousness. Often, signs of clinical death appear with massive blood loss, for example, after traffic accidents. The pathogenesis in this case is approximately the same - circulatory insufficiency leads to hypoxia, cardiac arrest and respiration.

Immortal visions

At the time of clinical death, people often see certain visions and experience all sorts of sensations. Someone is swiftly moving through the tunnel to the bright light, someone sees dead relatives, someone feels the effect of the fall. On the topic of visions during the clinical death there are still many discussions. Some people think this is a manifestation of the fact that consciousness is not connected with the body. Someone sees in this the transition from ordinary life to the afterlife, and someone believes that such deathbeds are no more than hallucinations that arose before the onset of clinical death. Be that as it may, a clinical death, of course, changes the people who survived it.