I only posted this for the bolded statements which I had not heard about before. If your doctor is any good at all s/he will be able to tell you about them.
http://www.rdmag.com/article/2016/11/controversial-experiment-brain-dead-revival-dropped?
A controversial experiment to revive brain-dead accident victims has been scrapped.
The Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) National Institute of
Medical Statistics officially removed the “ReAnima” trial from India’s
clinical trial registry on Nov. 11.
The experiment began in May when Himanshu Bansal, an orthopedic
surgeon at Anupam Hospital in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand,
announced plans to give approximately 20 brain-dead people a mix of
interventions including injections of mesenchymal stem cells, peptides,
transcranial laser stimulation and median nerve stimulation.
Transcranial laser stimulation is a process that involves shinning
pulses of near-infrared light in the brain, while median nerve
stimulation is the electrical stimulation of a major nerve that runs
from the neck to the arm. Both techniques have been proven to improve
cognition in patients with traumatic brain injury.
The ICMR identified several regulatory lapses in the trial that led
to the decision, including a failure to seek permission to proceed from
the Drug Controller General of India, a requirement for all clinical
trials in India.
Bansal previously described his aim as bringing brain-dead
individuals back to a minimally conscious state where patients show
flickers of consciousness like moving their eyes to track objects.
While there is little evidence to show that brain-dead people can
recover with function, Bansal has maintained that there is a significant
number of cases of people who have recovered full consciousness from a
minimally conscious state.
However, other researchers have doubted the project, claiming that
situations where brain-dead individuals on life support who return to a
fully functional state is hard to interpret and often lack evidence of
brain death such as the apnea test, a measure of whether the person’s
brain stem is making an effort to breathe.
Other concerns raised by scientists and physicians include whether
the trial is ethically justified and that the mix of interventions has
not been tested in animal models.
In a press statement, Bansal defended the proposal, saying there is no good animal models for human brain death.
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