Sometimes people really do die for no reason.

And I don't mean a senseless killing or a tragic accident.

I mean that sometimes the human body shuts down for reasons beyond our current medical knowledge.

We know that it starts either in the heart or the autonomic nervous system, but beyond that,

we in the medical field, we're stumped.

I'm an emergency physician working in a major city.

I'd like to break the silence on the issue, but that would be career suicide,

so I'll do it anonymously here. It happens more than you might think. Young, healthy woman

goes to sleep, just doesn't wake up the next day.

Middle-aged man collapses on the sidewalk, and we always come up with an excuse of how it happened.

The woman's doctor will dig into her medical history, find out she admitted to doing cocaine at a party in college,

or the middle-aged man's grandfather died of a heart attack, so he probably had a congenital defect that led to sudden cardiac death.

Problem is, a heart attack and sudden cardiac death, those are two different things.

And an overweight 80-year-old smoker having a heart attack doesn't explain why his 45-year-old half-marathon

running grandsons, heart just simply stopped beating one day on his way to the corner store.

It's so much easier to explain away the problem if they have a current medical condition.

Oh, he has diabetes.

That's why his heart stopped.

Never mind that his diabetes was well

managed, and he followed his medication regimen regularly. Oh, she had the flu, which we often forget,

kills people every year, and yeah, it does, but not normally 17-year-old varsity volleyball players

with no underlying health problems.

...