Sanjay Gupta On Medical Miracles, 'Cheating Death'

But I think, you know, this idea that there are patients that we say okay, they're brain dead, and in the United States that means they're dead. In different countries, it means different things, but we use brain death as a criteria here in the United States. And then I go talk to these patients. I've looked through their charts. They were declared brain dead. It was written in their chart as such. And here they are, sitting up talking to me. Hypothermia probably played a role. Medications probably played a role, but I think the larger message to me, and what I really spent the last couple years thinking about was we don't really know when to give up. And we really don't know what dead really means. We thought we did, but here this guy is talking to me, and you know, a bunch of people with crisp, white coats and hundreds of years of medical experience combined all urged this man's wife to pull the plug because they didn't think he'd ever recover, and here he is talking to me. What is dead? That's what I kept sort of stumbling upon and trying to figure out.