Be wrote:

The idea with an intranasal application might work. I don't know since I have no medical knowledge there. Have you? What do you think of my solution with a muscle relexant? I don't believe for one second in a fearful crying Sherlock. Can be a side effect of some kind of drug. 

http://sherlock.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?pid=63858#p63858

As a matter of fact I'm a medical student.
I really like your idea of a muscle relaxant being used, hadn't thought of that:
As all stuntmen know: relaxed limbs are less likely to break than unrelaxed onces.
Because of that, he might also not receive any spinal injury:
after all, the spine is just a stack of vertebrae, which are interconnected by lots of muscles.
Relax the muscles and the stack of vertebrae would react like a spring and won't break.

I also really adore your comparison to cats. (very clever)
As we all know, cats can survive high falls (up to 19 stories) without a scratch. 
And Sherlock actually does look a lot like a cat when falling: facing to the ground, ready to land on all four. All he needs is his muscles to be just as relaxed as a cat's...

The only problem I see is that, when falling at 70 km per hour (45mph) and suddenly crashing, you are probably going to have deceleration trauma's:
your organs are still falling when your body has stopped, thus causing them to smash into their cavity wall and bleed.
Then again: cats don't have this problem.
It helps that Sherlock is still young: his organs and arteries can stand a hit

This theory of mine seems more and more plausible. Did I mention TTX is a muscle relaxant?
And then there's Botulinum toxin, like you, Be, say in the link: Sherlock has researched Botox before...

There are a lot of good theories out there, but -in my opinion- most of them don't explain well enough how John couldn't feel a pulse or why the doctors of St. Bart would declare Sherlock dead.
Then I saw this:


What if he was administering a drug intranasally (instead of wiping his nose) at this moment?
By intranasal administration, a drug is absorbed by the blood vessels in the nose and causes its effects immediately (and not a few hours later, like when you take a pill). 

Now, this won't explain how he survived the fall (no drug can prevent your organs from getting crushed), but there are a few drugs that can make your pulse drop to a minimum and there is even a drug (or better: neurotoxin) that can make you feign death: tetrodotoxin.

Tetrodotoxin (found in pufferfish) stops your breathing, stops your heart and leaves you completely paralysed (but conscious).
A doctor would easily consider you dead.
​It is used by Haitian voodoo priests as a powder to make their victims 'die', be buried and then 'return from the dead'.
This is also how zombie stories were born.

If Sherlock used this, then the only thing Molly had to do was to keep him out of the freezer so he wouldn't die from hypothermia.
Oh, and to not cut him open.
Nobody else would know anything about Sherlock not being really dead.

What are your opinions?

Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The ending 's really great, it can actually change the way you look at religion.