One doctor has been making headlines recently due to a special skill of his that few other medical professionals have been able to replicate. He's able to bring people back from the dead.

Dr. Sam Parnia is the director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University in New York, but to some of his patients, he's nothing short of a miracle worker.

He has been studying the process of death and the ability to reclaim life for quite some time now, and his research is starting seriously benefit the patients that go in to see him. If you had a heart attack and went in to see Parnia last year, you would have been twice as likely as the national average to come back from the dead.

"It is my belief," he says, "that anyone who dies of a cause that is reversible should not really die any more. That is: every heart attack victim should no longer die. I have to be careful when I state that because people will say, 'My husband has died recently and you are saying that need not have happened'. But the fact is heart attacks themselves are quite easily managed." says Parnia.

Parnia goes on to describe how in order to stave off death he need only to slow the body's decaying process long enough to get things right. Cardiac arrests he does not believe to be an issue, nor does he believe infections or pneumonia to be reasonable causes of death.

"We used to think death was a sort of sudden event - we stop the oxygen going to the brain and after a few minutes that was that. But actually, we know that the dying process at the cellular level goes on for a period of time," noted Parnia

He slows down the rate of cell decay through a process of cooling the patients down while they are unconscious. Parnia observes that for a period of time after a person's death, the brain has its own mechanism for fending off decay by going into a state of hibernation.

These facts all point to the conclusion that death is a process that occurs over a much longer time span than we had initially realized. Such a revelation may give credence to the visions of the afterlife claimed by some people who have supposedly come back from the dead. Have these revelations impacted Parnia's stance on the spiritual world?

"No," he says, "and I don't have any religious way into this. But what I do know is that every area of inquiry that used to be tackled by religion or philosophy is now tackled and explained by science. One of the last things to be looked at in this way is the question of what happens when we die. This science of resuscitation allows us to look at that for the first time."