HW 30-Illness and Dying- Project

Everyone has some sort of definition on what death is, but most of our understanding of this concept is pretty vauge due to the fact that the word death can be interpreted in many ways. When our phones are not working we say they are dead or when somthing goes out of style we say it is dead, but even when we look at the word in a more literal sense it is still vague. obviously if we see a person on the floor unconcios, they are not breathing, their cold and have no pulse we will say that that person is dead. The problem somtimes is that certain senarios arent simmilar to this one. What if there is a person who uncounsios, and they way they recieve there blood and oxygen is artificail ,and yet there is electrical activity in the brain? Do we declare this person to be dead? According to the dominant view to this topic, which is in opposition to my families view, is that death occurs when there is no activity in the brain.

  Death was once defined as the cessation of heartbeat (cardiac arrest) and of breathing, but the development of CPR and prompt defibrillation have rendered that definition inadequate because breathing and heartbeat can sometimes be restarted. This is now called "clinical death". Events which were causally linked to death in the past no longer kill in all circumstances; without a functioning heart or lungs, life can sometimes be sustained with a combination of life support devices, organ transplants and artificial pacemakers."

What I discovered  through research was that today, where a definition of the moment of death is required, doctors and coroners usually turn to "brain death" or "biological death": People are considered dead when the electrical activity in their brain ceases (cf. persistent vegetative state). The possession of brain activities, or ability to resume brain activity, is a necessary condition to legal personhood in the United States. "It appears that once brain death has been determined … no criminal or civil liability will result from disconnecting the life-support devices." (Dority v. Superior Court of San Bernardino County)"

According to the National Geographic Death doesnt accur at one moment, death is a process, thus making it a frontier to understanding the balance between life and death. Science seems to show that when people hearts stop, organs and tissues can stay in a sort of quazi-daed state for hours. One thing that I found very interesting was a technique used to slow down the death process. Using the theraputic hypothermia, by wrapping sombody in a cooling device, and adding an icy saline chillled to just above freezing into the veins, this drops the body temp to 92 degrees-  Due to this chilling process it slows down the death process and blurs the border between life and death. Lenord Hayflick holds the world record for preserving human cells for 46 years, no one knew how many times a cell can devide until they die, but Hayflick descoverd that it took 50 times of cell devision before they died and called it the Hayflick limit.

 

This topic holds signifigance to me because my grandmother is reaching the end of her days. I remeber when our family came together when we had a family reuinion and after we were done partying we gad a serious descussion, what to do if my grandmother became a vegitable. Do we pull the plug because the brain would not be working or do we let her live until the whole sysytem shuts down? As a family we all agreed (rather violently) that a person is not dead until the whole body shuts down, and that pulling the plug would be out of the options.

 

 

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/3815/Overview#tab-Videos/05707_00