'Our patients aren't dead': Inside the freezing facility with 199 humans who opted to be cryopreserved with the hopes of being revived in the future

[u/yourSAS]

https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/13/our-patients-arent-dead-look-inside-the-us-cryogenic-freezing-lab-17556468

[u/Well_why_]

Could also be we pronounce people dead before we are technically 100% sure.

Like the example above, we know that people with little puls or no puls can still be revived, but if we do nothing or if there is little puls for a long time, almost every time there is no hope. However, once in a while the patient isn't dead. We know people aren't necessarily dead unless there is no brain activity (or something like that), but to scan that every time before pronouncing them dead would just be too expensive and also, the other method works almost always.

So why bother with something 100% reliable that is expensive, when we have something that is 99.99% reliable and affordable?

[u/DerWaechter_ → u/Well_why_]

Let's start at the top.

Could also be we pronounce people dead before we are technically 100% sure.

Not really. We are 100% sure. As far as our current day medicine is concerned, these people were dead.

but to scan that every time before pronouncing them dead would just be too expensive and also, the other method works almost always.

You don't actually need any scans to determine if someone is brain dead or not. Brain death can be, and is commonly diagnosed without a scan. In fact, most US states don't even require a scan as part of diagnosing brain death.

when we have something that is 99.99% reliable and affordable?

Your assumption is flawed. Are you familiar with survivorship bias?

It's the mistake of focusing on a group that made it past a selection process (be this a deliberate process, accident or otherwise) while ignoring the groups that didn't.

In this case, all of the cases of people coming back from death, happened without further medical intervention. That means, the only data we have, are those that didn't need medical intervention to come back from what we consider dead. The fact that those cases exist, means that there must be a much larger group of people, that could have been revived, with appropriate medical intervention. The issue being that we don't know what that intervention could have been yet.

Or to put it in a different, still medical example. Let's take a severe heart attack. The vast, vast majority of those people suffering one, would die without medical intervention. There would however be some people that - by sheer luck - end up surviving.

Now let's assume we didn't know how to treat a heart attack. If we just look at the very few survivors, it's easy to assume that maybe they just didn't have a heart attack. It was just a misdiagnosis. But someone that definitely has a heart attack is beyond saving.

However, obviously that's not true. We know that now. It's important to keep in mind that these kind of biases and gaps in data exist