Recently I had the opportunity to read, Dr. Sanjay Gupta's "Cheating Death". Overall I thought it was good but I think it may have been intended for lay readers in lieu of health care providers. There was a significant portion of the book spent on explaining various medical conditions and procedures that sometimes got tedious. Also there were chapters spent on hypothermia and suspended animation that I think might lead readers astray. The hypothermia chapter talked about the cooling process of cardiac and stroke patients at Columbia University in New York. As you can imagine at Columbia, they tend to be ahead of the research and doing protocols that most mainstream community hospitals (like I work at) are not pursuing. I think this can give laypeople a false sense of normalcy regarding the treatment of these medical conditions. I am not saying that we do not cool our cardiac patients but I do not think we do it at the level of Columbia.
There was one chapter in the book that I did find particularly interesting. It was the chapter on Near Death Experiences. That is not something you usually read about in the New England Journal or the Annals. Anyone who was fainted knows what it feels like to be there one second and gone the next. What I find fascinating are the levels of consciousness and how much we do not know about them. I have had a number of patients who are "near death" tell me that they see their dead spouse or sibling etc. I always tell the patient's families not to worry when the patient says these things because really how do we know that they are not there?