What is the impact of clinical death on cryonics?
Theoretically clinical death need not have any impact on cryonics because blood circulation and breathing can be artificially restored when the heart of a terminally-ill patient stops beating. In practice, procedures for treating ischemia (stopped blood circulation) in cryonics differ greatly between organizations. Even for organizations that advocate aggressive intervention, such as Alcor, logistical factors and limitations of closed-chest cardiopulmonary support during cooling mean that all cryonics patients will suffer some cerebral ischemic injury. Ideally, this injury can be limited to the equivalent of several minutes of ischemia at normal body temperature. It’s well known that 4-6 minutes of normothermic ischemia (circulatory arrest at normal body temperature) can be survived. It’s less well known that experimental protocols involving post-resuscitation hypothermia, hypertension, and hemodilution can reverse up to 13 minutes of normothermic ischemia without serious harm. Other p
