Conference: «Vida després de la vida» («Life after life»).
Conference «Vida després de la vida» («Life after life»), on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the Illustrious Official College of Physicians of Tarragona. Place: Assembly hall of the headquarters of the Official College of Physicians of Tarragona, Via de l’Imperi Romà, 11 bis. Speaker: Doctor Manuel Sans Segarra, doctor of the General and Digestive Surgery Service of Bellvitge University Hospital. Date of the event: Wednesday, 10th October of 2018. Video publication date: Thursday, 18th October of 2018. Duration: 57 minutes and 14 seconds. Language: Catalan, with some Spanish expressions.
We live in a materialistic and consumerist society in which death is a taboo, hence the conference title. The human being asks himself, «Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?».We have been searching for these answers and we have not found them yet in their totality. We are going to describe the experiences of some patients who have been clinically dead and who have managed to come back. These patients change their existential conception after their experiences. As chief of service, both in care therapy and in teaching, as well as in research, I have based myself on the scientific act, which is the law for which we know its bases, which we can reproduce experimentally in the laboratory. What I discuss here is largely scientifically based, but there is also a part that is not.
Why is a surgeon interested in these matters? We work in a highly specialized hospital that receives very critical patients from all over Catalonia, before the crisis, even from all over Spain, for cancer and transplants treatments, with very high survival rates in liver transplants. I have been very close to the deep pain of human beings, both the ill and their families, and very close to death.
We treat clinically dead patients: cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest and no mental activity that after applying cardiorespiratory resuscitation techniques we manage to recover after a few minutes. Patients tell us about truly spectacular experiences they have lived during this time lapse.
Post English translation: Núria Comas Viladrich.