How Ice Can Save Your Life

My brother, who is in charge of lifeflight for the Medical College of Virginia, notes that they have been using hypothermia in cardiac arrests over the past five years...

 

Therapeutic Hypothermia' Can Protect the Brain in the Aftermath of Cardiac Arrest

 

For decades, conventional wisdom in treating patients with cardiac arrest was that if the heart stopped beating for longer than six to 10 minutes, the brain would be dead. Now a new treatment being embraced by a growing number of U.S. hospitals suggests that patients can be brought back to a healthy life even if their heart is stopped for 20 minutes, perhaps longer.
The difference is profound. In recent months around the U.S., doctors and nurses say, cardiac-arrest patients who would previously have been given up for dead have been revived and discharged to return to their families and jobs with all or nearly all of their cognitive abilities intact.