New evidence of how our cells behave is turning the tables on emergency medicine and changing the way we treat clinically dead people. 

It has been long understood that our cells die of irreversible damage due to a lack of oxygen within 4 to 5 minutes after the heart stops beating.  Makes sense, right?  

While this may make sense, Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania provides evidence that cells stay alive for hours, rather than minutes, after a person is pronounced clinically dead.  What's more, it is not the lack of oxygen that kills the cells - but it is actually the reperfusion, or resumption of oxygen supply that kills them. 

With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

Dr. Becker explains that our bodies can not tell the difference between an abnormal (cancerous) cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen and therefore the body's main defense system kicks in and kills the cell.

We are already seeing remarkable success in hospitals using this new theory.  Last year, a study involving four hospitals showed that 80 percent of their patients left the hospitals alive.  Whereas a study of traditional methods saw only 15 percent success.