a strange question i know, but when are we dead?
October 8th, 2008
In a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors at Children’s Hospital in Denver describe how they removed hearts from infants 75 seconds after they stopped. The infants were declared dead of heart failure, even as their hearts, in new bodies, resumed ticking.
Now in medicine, “Dead” means irreversibly stopped, but stoppages are increasingly reversible. When life support ends, says one bioethicist, “not using viable organs wastes precious life-saving resources” and “costs the lives of other babies.” Failure to take body parts looks like lethal negligence.
Is this wrong?
Entry Filed under: Think About It!
2 Comments
Add your own1. Reggie_Geez | October 8th, 2008 at 2:49 PM
One night, I was surfing the tube and I came across a show called I Woke up In The Morgue. The people suffered from a medical condition known as catalepsy. Basically, they passed out and would have no signs of life, but they could feel and hear everything going on around them. One lady got taken to a morgue THREE different times because they thought she was dead!!! This lady was completely conscious of where she was and what was going on… one time she was in the morgue for THREE days with dead bodies and everything. It is amazing the kinds of conditions people can have that we don’t even know about.
So dead????
Maybe… maybe just in a rush to be a “hero”? hmmmmm….
Makes me wonder sometimes!
2. NT | October 10th, 2008 at 10:32 PM
I read that article a few days ago. I definitely sat up thinking about it after I read it. Intriguing.
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