On 10/25/2010 04:21 PM, William H. Fite wrote:
Mike is correct. Brain activity does not screech to a halt but peters out
over a period of minutes once the heart stops beating.
When we (I'm in the medical field and not, by any stretch of the imagination
an engineer) speak of someone being "brain dead" or "flat line EEG," we
don't really mean that there is no electrical activity in the brain at all,
only that there is no purposeful activity.
That is why, in most jurisdictions--not all--death is defined as cessation
of heartbeat. In the eyes of the law, that's a dichotomous variable; it is
or it ain't. Which means, from a legal perspective, at least, that when lay
people say that so-and-so was dead for a time and then brought back, they
are correct, cornball as it sounds.
Actually, heart beat doesn't cease like snapping a light switch but trails
off into meaningless blips and wiggles that can go on for a while.
Clinical death, to physicians and other health professionals is when the
machine has quit and it can't be fired up again. Vague, yes, but perfectly
adequate.
For several reasons this definition is not usable for all cases anymore.
There are cases when the brain can be considered dead, but the rest of
the patient is relatively healthy. For the purpose of making organ
transplantation possible, brain death is clinically being used, with the
good old ticker and breath as a rough indication and subsequent failures
of restoring those has failed.
There is one case in which a Swedish medical student was out skiing in
Norway and went through the ice and was being held there by the strong
water. It took them 45 min just to get her out of the water. Her heart
had stopped. Her respiration had stopped. She have had no pulse or
breath for over an hour when they finally started working on her at the
hospital. She survived and is almost completely restored. She works at
that very hospital. Cooling patients down causes less brain-damage and
is now an established treatment for certain trauma cases. The
heart-compressions being done helps a lot to keep brain-damages down. We
keep learning more and more about reducing damages on heart attack patients.
So that definition has become less and less meaningful for that very
reason. Not all legal systems reflect this thought, but as I recall the
Swedish legal system did change this a few years back.
So.....I see no way in which one could determine with precision when life
ends. At least not with the precision that this group would consider even
minimally acceptable.
Agreed. We might agree on day. Maybe hour. Then it becomes kind of
difficult.
Cheers,
Magnus
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