Thanks for pointing that out Captain Obvious. And I earned the tee shirt for needing to make that decision-- more than once.

For all the times I have done CPR or those times I have to deal with a major trauma, never once did I see Jesus there waiting to take a turn at chest compressions, I never once saw the Holy Ghost crawl into an upside down car wreak with me, and God sure as hell was not there when I had to scale up out of that 20ft deep drainage ditch and had to explain to a Mother that her 11 year old son was dead under that 4-wheeler and there was nothing anyone could do to fix that.

God ain’t never had anything to do with it.

So why do we do CPR? Why do we use AEDs? Was all the CPR I have done a waste of time?

Dead means you are going to stay that way. Dead is irreversible. And until I and/or a doctor say you are dead, you are not. You are just maybe dead.

No it’s not. It only becomes a criteria when you can no longer reasonably be sure that it can’t be restarted.

Source: Retired medic that has pronounced my share of dead people AND restarted a few hearts also.

As an old and retired medic, the lack of respiration and pulse doesn’t mean you are dead-dead. On the scale of "Not Dead to Dead-Dead, a lack of respiration’s and pulse means you are at the maybe dead on the line. And other factors will make the final determination about if you are actually dead or not.

The first determining factor in figuring out where the patient is on the scale, is if you make it into my amp-a-lamps or not. If you do, you are alive at least for a little while longer and I’mma let the doctor sort it all out for you. If you don’t make it in the back of my bus, then you are dead-dead and nothing can change that-- not even god himself.

As an old and now retired medic. My personal definition of dead was if you made into the back of my amp-a-lamps or not. If you did you weren’t dead-- you were merely having a bit of a bad day. I might have needed to do your breathing for you and I might have needed to make your heart pump blood. But until some doctor somewhere decided you weren’t worth his time and effort, you were still alive. Because I don’t haul dead people.

So, by my definition as a trained and professional medical person, you where never dead-dead. Just someone have a bad day among many others having a bad day at that time.

It’s a good thing that the lack of a heartbeat isn’t the ultimate definition of dead. But it can be one of the markers of dead.