Things that Matter

I found this AP article entitled Los Angeles Hospital Gets Rep for "Raising Dead" to be interesting. Underneath the sensationalism and strange language—for example, what does it mean to be "basically dead" if you are not actually dead?—there seems to be a genuine medical advance. Persons are being resuscitated who formerly would have been deemed to be beyond help. A UCLA expert referred to in the article, cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Gerald Buckberg, is quoted as saying,

[T]he window is wide open to new thinking … We can salvage [persons who hearts have quit beating] way beyond the current time frames that are used. We've changed the concept of when the heart is dead permanently.

It seems that this could have significant implications for medical ethics, including possibly decisions made regarding organ donations.