People who live without a heartbeat. A person cannot live without a homeland, just as one cannot live without a heart.

Seven years ago, doctors from the Texas Heart Institute developed an artificial heart that is far superior to all previous analogues. This device is smaller, cheaper, more durable, more reliable and safer, but it has one small drawback: when using it, a person has absolutely no pulse.

The device, previously tested on 39 calves, was officially introduced in 2011. Then 55-year-old Craig Lewis, who was on the verge of death, had to have his heart replaced. It refused to work because of the harmful proteins that had accumulated due to a disease known as cardiac amyloidosis.

Unfortunately, the patient's condition was so severe that it was impossible to help him with standard procedures. Many devices designed to "help" the human heart have only a short-term effect or are suitable for only one side of the heart. Devices for both sides are often too large for patients (especially women).

Not only were both sides of Lewis's heart damaged, the left was in such bad shape that even an implant couldn't help. Were it not for this new technology, Lewis's only option would have been to stand at the back of the line of more than 100,000 people waiting for an estimated 2,200 hearts.

An instrument designed by Drs. Billy Cohn and O.H. Fraser, has already managed to prove its effectiveness. But its benefits don't end there. Up to that point, device life was a huge problem, and understandably so. It is unlikely that your faucet in the bathroom or in the kitchen will be able to work continuously for many years. Artificial hearts are little better: they rarely last more than two years. After all, they must make about 100,000 strokes a day, which is 35 million times a year.

The device implanted in Lewis was much more durable: it did not pump blood, unlike its predecessors. It used rotating parts that kept the blood circulating at all times. This not only ensured a longer working life, but also greatly reduced the risk of blood clots, which was a serious problem with previous implants.

The absence of a pulse stems precisely from the fact that with this device the blood is constantly flowing and never stops. If you listened to it through a stethoscope, you would only hear a hum. The disadvantages of the device are yet to be known. For example, whether the constant movement of blood will cause additional health problems. The creators even talk about the possible psychological disadvantages of life without a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, Craig Lewis lived with this device for only five weeks. The doctors stressed that it worked fine on its own, but due to other illnesses, they had to turn it off and let the patient go more peacefully. Another person named Jakub Halik from the Czech Republic lived with the same device for six months in 2012 before he died of liver failure.

Surprisingly, a fourteen-year-old patient from South Carolina was able to live without a heart for 118 days. All this time she was waiting for his second transplant. According to the girl herself, without a heart, she did not feel like a full-fledged person.

The first heart transplant was performed by experienced doctors at a Florida hospital. When the girl was admitted to the hospital, the doctors gave her a terrible diagnosis - "dilated cardiomyopathy". The disease leads to the expansion of the cardiac cavity and to a decrease in its contractile function. The consequence of the disease is acute heart failure and disturbed heart rhythm. Inside, the formation of blood clots, fibrosis and cell death is allowed. The development of this disease leads to a serious metabolic disorder, toxic damage and an autoimmune disease. In addition, this disease can be caused by alcoholism, lack of strength and many other necessary substances and elements in the body. A high risk of the disease exists in middle-aged men. But now people of all age categories suffer from it. Death comes suddenly.

During the first operation, the girl received a donor heart transplant by doctors from the Jackson Memorial Medical Center at the University of Miami. But the operation was unsuccessful. A few days later, the surgeons had to remove the donor organ and replace it with an artificial one. It consists of two small pumps that pump blood. According to doctors, at any moment the girl could lose her life. There were situations when Jana Simmons stopped breathing, the girl’s kidney, liver, intestines and stomach began to malfunction. Until the twenty-ninth of October, the patient was in the hospital under the strict supervision of doctors. All this time she didn't move. On October 29, another operation was performed to transplant another donor heart. The next day, the doctors realized that the patient also needed a transplant of the failed kidney.

Doctors say that the previous patient from Germany had to wait for a donor heart for almost nine months. For several days now, the girl has been living with a new heart. Her cardiogram is perfect. She herself says that while she lived without a real heart, she did not feel like a full-fledged person.

Postoperative rehabilitation will continue for a very long time. Doctors say that the two weeks after the transplant were the most difficult. But everything went great. And in a few days, the owner of the new heart will be fifteen years old.

Artificial heart transplant

The first completely artificial heart for transplantation was developed and created by French scientists. They are sure that the first transplantation of an artificial organ can take place already in 2011.

The new device was developed by specialists from Carmat, a biomedical subsidiary of the European Aerospace and Defense Group (EADS). The development was headed by Professor Alan Carpentier, who has been practicing for many years at the Georges Pompidou Hospital in Paris. Several scientific groups from all over the world, including space technology specialists from EADS, actively participated in the project.

For a long time, scientists have been developing a project to create an artificial heart that could most accurately fit all the characteristics and criteria of a real human heart. The first model is already ready. In two and a half years, scientists hope to have the first organ that can be transplanted.

Genetic heart diseases in most cases cause serious ones even at a young age. For example, this 25-year-old guy named Stan Larkin (Stan Larkin) from the United States was diagnosed with a rare disease called familial cardiomyopathy, which is caused by dystrophy or hypertrophy of the muscle fibers of the heart, chronic inflammation of the myocardium and obstructive changes in small coronary vessels. Generally, a heart transplant is the only available treatment option for cardiomyopathy. But at present, it is still a very complicated procedure, for which a large number of people are registered, since there is a shortage of donors around the world.

Portable artificial heart Freedom

That is why Stan Larkin had to wait 555 days before it was his turn to receive a healthy donor heart for transplant. But what must a sick person do to survive while waiting for their turn? It turns out that there are many artificial devices that perform the functions of the heart, which independently and continuously can pump blood through the patient's body. For example, the portable partially external device Freedom uses a motor, a pair of valves and compressed air to carry out the basic functions of the heart. Thanks to him, Larkin lived without a heart for more than a year, waiting for a transplant operation. Currently, after his heart transplant, Stan feels great, he is a perfectly healthy person.

The first heart transplant was performed fifty years ago, but painstaking research and technology improvements have only made this complex surgical operation safe today. Moreover, the rapid development of engineering art and the improvement of artificial implants allow a person to live for more than a year without a heart at all, using a portable heart instead. Thus, even if you have acute heart failure, you have the hope of successfully managing it.

“O people, my brethren! Do not defile your bodies with unclean food... The earth gives us innocent riches and gifts in abundance and allows us to feast without shedding blood, without staining ourselves with murder!

Pythagoras

Improper nutrition leads to sad results. With abundant consumption of meat food containing nitrogenous extractive substances, the body's acid-base balance is disturbed, which can cause diseases such as uric acid diathesis and gout. Meat and fish food requires a significant intake of salt, which also has a harmful effect on the body.

One of the most serious and dangerous diseases of our time, without a doubt, are cancer and cardiovascular diseases, which annually claim the lives of millions of people. Research over the past twenty years has shown with certainty that there is an association between meat consumption and cancer of the colon, rectum, breast, and uterus. Cancer of these organs is extremely rare in those who eat little or no meat, but is common among those who eat it.

The 1961 Journal of the American Physicians Association stated: "Changing to a vegetarian diet prevents the development of cardiovascular disease in 90-97% of cases." In other words, virtually all heart disease is linked to eating meat. If you do not eat meat, then the heart will not hurt.

In the form of each individual disease, Mother Nature gives us a certain clue that indicates what we are doing wrong. Everyone knows that killing the innocent and defenseless is highly inhumane and heartless. In the esoteric sense, the heart is the abode of the soul, the element of the heart is love; its purpose is to learn to love. The human heart should be soft and able to love. The actions of a person with a soft heart are called humane. A cruel person is called heartless.

Love and cruelty are incompatible. If a person allows such cruelty as the unjustified eating of the corpses of animals - his younger brothers, then his heart dies: the heart has no reason to live if the energies of love and compassion that feed it, for which it was created, do not flow through it. The energies of cruelty that accompany eating meat poison and kill our heart.

Heart failure… What does this diagnosis mean?...

Soul evolution

There is no doubt that human life is much more valuable than the life of animals. But what exactly is the main difference between humans and animals, besides the fact that we work in factories and drive cars, what exactly gives our life a special value? After all, animals also know how to think and have consciousness, and everyone recognizes this.

The Wall Street Journal published the results of a number of studies that found that animals can count, understand cause and effect, think abstractly, solve problems, and even lie. In the last few years, leading journals have published reports on the introspective ability of dolphins and chimpanzees.

In 2013 The government of India has officially given dolphins the status of "non-human species", banning performances using captive dolphins - in dolphinariums, aquariums, oceanariums and announcing that dolphins "should have their own special rights". Thus, India became the first country to recognize the unique intelligence and self-understanding of representatives of the order of aquatic mammals - cetaceans.

Dolphins are highly intelligent creatures with a highly developed social organization. According to research, dolphins are characterized by human-like self-awareness and involvement in a complex system of communication; like humans, they have their own language and communicate with each other in fully connected sentences. Before they are a year old, dolphins choose their own unique names, which are a series of complex sound signals. From that moment on, all other dolphins of the same social group use the personal name of each when addressing each other. And this is not all that we know about dolphins, which the ancient Greeks called "sea people" ...

But not only dolphins are personalities, but all creatures endowed with consciousness. Scientists note that rats also have a sense of humor, mice sympathize with their comrades and help them out in trouble, and the most intelligent of birds - blue bush jays - are capable of "mental time travel", which allows them to remember where they hid worms or grains.

Animals also know how to love and hate, to be affectionate and cry, to protect and be betrayed. They are just as curious and also love to play and even play pranks. They also know how to cry, love children and yearn in separation from their loved ones. Swan love has become a proverb: these noble creatures never cheat on their chosen one, and if one of the birds dies, the other often loses her life, falling from a great height, folding her wings.

Our only and most important difference is our thirst for spiritual knowledge. Self-awareness, the desire for the source of all that exists - for God - regardless of a particular religion - separates man from animals. The consciousness of animals is wholly directed towards the outer world; they are constantly concerned only with the search for food, procreation, arranging their home or protecting their territory.

The ability and desire to know one's spiritual nature is inherent only in man. In accordance with the doctrine of the reincarnation of the soul (reincarnation), the material world is a kind of school of spiritual development, in which the soul after death passes into the “next class” - is born in a body of a higher level, which allows you to gain certain experience, show appropriate qualities and satisfy the desires inherent in this kind of life.

This can be compared to how a person, being born, first begins to crawl, then walk on his feet; from vehicles, we first master the tricycle, then the two-wheeled; having learned to ride a bicycle, we can change to a motorcycle. An adult can drive a car, and after some practice, fly a helicopter and an airplane.

Also, the soul, starting from imprisonment in the body of a crystal, gradually passes into the body of an infusoria, fish, plant, insect, bird, animal, gradually mastering various abilities and developing its consciousness. In fact, all other forms of life are designed to seek pleasure within the material universe, and only when entering the human body, the soul acquires the ability to penetrate its consciousness into the spheres of higher dimensions and reveal its spiritual nature through gaining spiritual experience.

The human body is the "graduation class" of the school of the material world; realizing himself as an eternal spiritual being, as a part of the Supreme, a person is able to reach the highest levels of love and gain the ability to perceive spiritual reality through communication with God, which is the highest point of the evolution of the soul.

According to the doctrine of reincarnation, the only purpose of a person is to achieve a state of holiness and reunite him with God, and a person begins his journey as a person with questions: “Who am I? Who created this world? Why do I live? What is the meaning of my existence? As long as a person is only interested in maintaining his existence, it is believed that his soul is still sleeping and is in the animal concept of life. That is why in Christianity the needs of the body are called animal needs.

In ancient times, people who did not seek God were equated with "two-legged animals," and Jesus called them "the walking dead." About the spiritual emptiness and meaninglessness of their lives, he said: "The dead bury their dead." "The soul is dead" means that it does not live its true life.

Receiving a human body, the soul is endowed with the most developed consciousness, freedom of choice, self-determination and responsibility for committed actions. If the soul in the human body continues to be engaged only in satisfying the animal needs of the body, then it can return to the lower forms of life for a while, so that, after several lives, again get the opportunity to learn about God. If a living being, being in a human body, makes attempts to develop spiritually, but does not pay due attention to this, it will be born again as a human being, retaining its previous experience in the subconscious, in order to continue from where it left off, like a schoolboy left for the second year.

Since the soul is immortal, it can be born in a human body almost indefinitely, until it develops its once lost relationship with God. According to this concept, a slain being will be forced to be reborn in the same type of body in order to complete its training at that level. Therefore, killing is a delay in the evolution of a living being and is subject to punishment. Anyone who kills or causes suffering without permission to living beings will himself have to go through what he did to others.

The doctrine of the reincarnation of the soul is part of all Eastern religions. This concept was also shared by all Christians until the Second Constantinople (Fifth Ecumenical) Council in 553, when, by order of Emperor Justinian, the doctrine of reincarnation was removed from the Bible. The concept of a “disposable life”, according to which a person after death goes to hell or heaven forever, gave the church and the authorities the opportunity to keep people in even greater fear and more brutally manipulate them. The Roman Church refused to accept the new doctrine until the end of the sixth century.

The fact that the soul of animals and the soul of man differs only in the level of evolutionary development is another important argument in defense of vegetarianism: you cannot offend others just because they are in elementary grade!

Who doesn't smoke or drink...

“He who does not smoke and does not drink will die healthy!” - this is how those who do not see the need to be healthy if they have to die anyway love to tease vegetarians. These people use the same logic as children who say that there is no point in brushing your teeth and washing your hands, because soon they will become dirty again.

Such people very often give the same argument in defense of their position, which sounds like this: “But I saw or heard somewhere, I don’t remember whether it was shown on TV, or someone told a joke, but one man, I know for sure - and drank, and smoked, and ate meat, and walked, and lived up to a hundred years, and now lives! And the other one didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and ate right, and went in for sports, but at the age of forty he took it and died completely healthy - he was hit by a car!

I would like to somehow comment on how these stories are created, but the truth is simple: people believe what they want to believe, and logic has nothing to do with it. Of course, no one argues - thanks to healthy parents and a good family gene pool, a person can get very good health, which is difficult to destroy even with a long destructive effect.

On the other hand, if someone's ancestors were not distinguished by good health, and especially if they drank well before conception (which is not so rare), then such a person from birth will be more prone to illness, even taking care of his health. As in the case of a car: you can hardly follow a reliable Mercedes, but it will work well and work properly for a long time. On the other hand, if your parents gave you some kind of decrepit car, similar to the old Zaporozhets, then something will constantly break in it, no matter how well you take care of it.

Health must always be protected, even if today nothing bothers you. Health, as well as knowledge and wealth, must be constantly increased, otherwise they will decrease by themselves. And if not you, then your children and grandchildren will feel the sad consequences of your bad habits on their health.

For those who jokingly throw: “He who does not smoke or drink will die healthy!” It will be a great surprise to learn that many people strive to maintain health precisely in order to die healthy, with a clear, pure consciousness. According to Eastern teachings, it is the state of consciousness at the time of death that determines where the soul of a person will go after his death.

Death is an examination summing up a certain period of our eternal existence. If at the time of this examination it is obvious that a person has learned to think and act loftily, then he is directed to the higher worlds, where all conditions correspond to the level of his consciousness. If a person dies in the delirium of delirium tremens, then he ends up in places corresponding to the level of his worldview at the moment. Therefore, any food that does not correspond to the highest principles of harmony and mercy is rejected by those who seriously intend to achieve true spiritual enlightenment.

The feeling of the Motherland from infancy enters the heart of every person. It comes with the contemplation of growing grass in the yard, blooming lilac under the window or snowdrifts on the sides of the path leading to the gate. Pictures of childhood - mother on the porch, grandmother at the table by the samovar, father in the garden at work - remain forever in the mind and are remembered throughout life as something gratifying. The love for the motherland is felt especially keenly by people who have left it for some reason.

Russian writers and poets, who experienced the burden of separation from their homeland, could not but reflect these experiences in their work.

M.Yu. Lermontov, forced by the will of fate to go to the Caucasus, left Russia with pain. This pain is very palpable in the poem "Clouds". By emphasizing the impassivity and indifference of the clouds rushing from the "sweet north towards the south", the poet enhances the impression of the suffering of the exile, turning to the clouds with an internal monologue. And the lines written in his hearts “Farewell, unwashed Russia...” are just dictated by resentment, young ardor and an immature understanding of the impossibility of ideal political systems.

V.V. Nabokov left Russia in his youth, and nostalgia became his tragedy. With what force the painful love for the Motherland sounds in his poems!

“But wherever the path runs,
we dreamed of the Russian land.
Exile, where is your sting,
foreign land, where is your strength?

The dream to be back in the Fatherland is reflected in dreams (the poem "Execution"), the embodiment of this dream was fraught with a real danger to life, but in the heart there is a willingness to pay for a meeting with the Motherland with life, he is seized by a passionate desire for the situation: "Russia, stars, the night of the execution and the whole ravine in bird cherry trees.

Nostalgia eventually becomes unbearable for Nabokov. The poem "To Russia" is an appeal to his native country with an ardent request to leave him, not to torment him with his "blind influxes." In order not to meet her in his dreams, he is ready to “give up all kinds of dreams”, deprive himself of his favorite books, and most importantly, “exchange for any dialect” the most dear to him in exile - his native language. Changed. And wrote "Lolita". As if he changed his essence, because the Russian language was the spiritual island of the Motherland in a foreign land.

Separation from the Motherland for a person who is not devoid of spirituality is always painful. This is the loss of an invisible connection with the ancestors, the loss of a comfortable feeling of the familiar cultural environment, the loss of the native nature dear to the heart. In such cases, it is often said that the heart remained at home. Indeed, to live without the Motherland, without love for it, is the same as living without a heart.