A Heart-Pounding Post

Well, I guess that I am not so diligent about writing in these blogs as I would have hoped. However, I must come to consider the question, is daily posting even necessary? I came into this post with something I wanted to say. Something I read on the internet struck me as significant and I would like to post on it. But, before I get into this significant article I must admit that the purpose I had in mind for this blog was to keep people informed (who wanted to be) about college stuff. I will post those things also, there are many things that have happened and many things that I need to complete in order to finish my preparations for college. I also want to post (like I am for this post) interesting things that I find and comment on them. I guess that is the feeling that most bloggers have.


Well, as far as that interesting thing that I saw on the internet. I have MSN as my current homepage on the internet. The top article read: The New Science of Death. For those of you who go on MSN.com know what I am talking about. For me, it sounded interesting enough that I could spare some time and brain cells reading this article. As I did, I found it very interesting. It talked about how a doctor by the name of Dr. Lance Becker discovered that (after looking at the heart under a microscope) hours after a heart had died, the cells still live on. This is contrary to the previous thought that once a person's heart has stopped beating, minutes later the cells die. Well if you can wrap your head around that concept for a moment I will continue. According to the article, cells die because we give them oxygen in place of the heart. The reason is this: because the standard procedure for someone in cardiac arrest is to feed the cells oxygen and try to start the heart. When the cells get oxygen that is a process called reperfusion. Forced repofusion causes the cells to die because the cell has a security system built into it to kill off abnormal cells, or more commonly known as cancer cells. The cell's security system can't tell the difference between an abnormal cell and a cell undergoing quick reperfusion performed by the doctors, so it kills the cells. Dr. Lance Becker reasoned that if and emergency response team can slow reactions down in the heart and brain and maintain circulation throughout the body, this will give time for the heart to be safely restarted so that the patient will be able to be discharged in good condition.


This is just amazing what we have discovered just by looking under a microscope. The funny thing is, it just took someone to look under a microscope at a dead heart hours later. Now, how long have we been treating people for heart attacks? Probably a long time. How many people have died? Probably many over the period of time. Why so long later that we discovered this? Could it have been possible for someone to have seen this earlier? Maybe. It would be interesting to find out the thought process behind looking at a dead heart hours after the death of the person. Maybe the doctor was initially looking for something, but ended up finding this.


While I have written a detailed summary of the article I read, for those of you readers out there who want to read the original article for yourself, here is the link.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186/site/newsweek?GT1=9951
Feel free to leave any sort of comments on this or any other post. All comments will be fine, whether you are correcting my grammar, my summarizations, or just to say your thoughts. No comment is stupid, unless you are blatantly being stupid. Please be constructive.