More significantly, it can cost the patient his or her life. We must pay a price, in anguish as well as well as money, if we fail to live up to our new responsibilities as medical decision-makers. Cryonics, which is based on the seemingly simple concept that a patient who is considered beyond help today may be treatable using the medicine of tomorrow, now creates still more choices. Our objective here is to look not at the case for and against human cryopreservation, but at the consequences which medical personnel must deal with when a patient chooses to be cryopreserved. Currently, physicians are not accustomed to concerning themselves with the state of a patient's brain after legal death has been pronounced.
Doctors naturally restrict themselves to the current state of their art.
Those of us who have accepted the logic of cryopreservation do not have that luxury. We believe that the pattern of atoms in a human brain determines whether that brain is potentially functional tomorrow, even though it may not be functional today. Since orthodox physicians are unlikely to share our perspective, it's up to us to make the crucial decisions that may determine whether that pattern of atoms is preserved, and whether cryopreservation turns out to be a success or a failure. Our decisions begin before a patient dies. That may sound like something of an oxymoron, but I assure you, it is not.