Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles that Are Saving Lives Against All Odds

This riveting book from a bestselling author and neurosurgeon explores the unbelievable science that has saved lives and made recovery possible despite all odds.

"An exciting medical thriller with the compassion, hope, excitement and aspiration that define Sanjay." —Lance Armstrong, Olympic athlete

An unborn baby with a fatal heart defect. A skier submerged for an hour in a frozen Norwegian lake. A comatose brain surgery patient whom doctors have declared a "vegetable".

Twenty years ago all of them would have been given up for dead, with no realistic hope for survival. But today, thanks to incredible new medical advances, each of these individuals is alive and well. A bold new breed of doctors has achieved amazing rescues by refusing to accept that any life is irretrievably lost. Extended cardiac arrest, "brain death," not breathing for over an hour—all these conditions used to be considered inevitably fatal, but they no longer are. Today, revolutionary advances are blurring the traditional line between life and death in fascinating ways.

Drawing on real-life stories and using his unprecedented access to the latest medical research, Dr. Gupta dramatically presents exciting accounts of how pioneering physicians and researchers are altering our understanding of how the human body functions when it comes to survival—and why more and more patients who once would have died are now alive. 

From experiments with therapeutic hypothermia to save comatose stroke or heart attack victims to lifesaving operations in utero to the study of animal hibernation to help wounded soldiers on far-off battlefields, these remarkable case histories transform and enrich all our assumptions about the true nature of death and life.

Sanjay Gupta, MD, is a practicing neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital and associate chief of service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.