Since ancient times, people have been interested in the question of what is clinical death. She was invariably referred to as irrefutable evidence of the afterlife, because even people far from religion involuntarily began to believe that life would not end after death.
In fact, clinical death is nothing more than a borderline between life and death, when a person can still be returned if resuscitation is carried out for three to four, and in some cases five to six minutes. In this state, the human body almost completely stops working. The heart stops, breathing disappears, roughly speaking, the human body is dead, it does not show any signs of life. It is interesting that oxygen starvation caused by clinical death does not lead to irreversible consequences, as occurs in other cases.
Clinical death is characterized by the following symptoms: asystole, apnea and coma. These signs relate to the initial stage of clinical death. These signs are very important for successful assistance, because the sooner the clinical death is determined, the higher the chance of saving a person’s life.
Signs 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 stationary). And in a coma, the person has completely no consciousness, the pupils expand and do not respond to light.
Clinical death. Effects
The outcome of this dire condition directly depends on the speed of a person's return to life. Like any other terminal state, clinical death has certain consequences. It all depends on the speed of resuscitation. If a person can be brought back to life in less than three minutes, then the degenerative processes in the brain will not have time to begin, that is, we can say that serious consequences will not happen. But if resuscitation is prolonged, then the hypoxic effect on the brain can be irreversible, up to the complete loss of mental functions by a person. In order for hypoxic changes to remain reversible as long as possible, the method of cooling the body is used. This allows you to extend the "reversible" period by several minutes.
Causes of clinical death
There are a large number of reasons why a person may be on the verge of life and death. Most often, clinical death is a consequence of exacerbation of serious diseases in which cardiac arrest and pulmonary function stop. This causes a state of hypoxia, which, acting on the brain, leads to loss of consciousness. Often, signs of clinical death occur with massive blood loss, for example, after traffic accidents. The pathogenesis in this case is approximately the same - circulatory failure leads to hypoxia, cardiac arrest and breathing.
Dying visions
At the time of clinical death, people often see certain visions and experience all kinds of sensations. Someone is rapidly moving through the tunnel to bright light, someone sees dead relatives, someone feels the effect of a fall. Numerous discussions are still underway on visions during clinical death. Some people consider this a manifestation of the fact that consciousness is not connected with the body. Someone sees this as a transition from ordinary life to the afterlife, and someone believes that such dying visions are nothing more than hallucinations that arose even before the onset of clinical death. Be that as it may, clinical death undoubtedly changes the people who survive it.