It provides a record that can be analyzed by researchers and clinicians who are trying to understand the conditions under which survival is possible.

It informs the development of treatment protocols.

It creates the evidence base that shifts medical practice — moving the needle from “patients like this cannot survive” to “patients like this sometimes do survive, and here is what we learned from the cases where they did.”

The specific documentation of Jean Hilliard’s case in the January 1981 article referenced in Dr.

Iseke’s commentary is part of this tradition.

The case notes — the temperature readings, the pulse rate, the clinical observations, the treatment applied, the timeline of recovery — are the raw material that medical researchers can use to think about what happened and why.