*I saw this article a day or so ago. I‘ll just drop this here. Though not particularly relevant, the article does have some interesting info re:hypothermia.
Doctors say that it is impossible for a completely frozen person to make a recovery. But it is possible for someone who appears frozen — limbs stiff, skin cold and hard, and without a pulse or breath — to be resuscitated, depending on how long the person has been out in the cold.
“If all the tissue in your body is ice, or has ice in it, then you’re not coming back,” said Ken Zafren, a physician and a professor of emergency medicine at Stanford University, who also works in Alaska. But, he added, “I’ve seen plenty of cases in which the person really looked dead, and could come back.”
During hypothermia, an adult’s body temperature can cool well below the normal average of 98.6 degrees, Dr. Zafren said. A person’s pulse and breathing slow significantly, reducing the body’s need for oxygen. Eventually, the person may go into cardiac arrest, stopping the pulse and breathing altogether. But because the brain is cold, the lack of oxygen takes longer to cause damage, he said.
A person could persist in this state for several hours before being completely frozen, he added, noting a medical maxim: “No one is dead until they’re warm and dead.”
…
But not all emergency medical workers and doctors are familiar with the warming technique, Dr. Brugger said. He cited one case in which a 16-year-old girl
found without a pulse after hours in the cold had been declared dead before extracorporeal warming was attempted. “An emergency physician tried to resuscitate on site, but this does not make sense, because if you don’t rewarm the body, you can resuscitate as long as you wish and it’s completely useless,” he added, noting that had the girl’s blood been rewarmed externally, she most likely would have survived.….
“Being
mostly dead is being somewhat alive,” Dr. Zafren said. So far, doctors have been unable to pinpoint the precise point of no return, he added. “But what we do know is if you’re dead for too long, you don’t come back.”
An incident involving a group of frozen bodies on the fourth season of the HBO series has raised some scientific questions.
www.nytimes.com