What Is Brain Death?

Baloney. There is no reliable technology capable of determining brain death. Numerous patients who have been declared brain dead have woken up.

Brain death can indeed be tricky to determine without proper equipment, and certainly some doctors are likely better at it than others, but, to the best of my knowledge, people don't come back from brain death. Of course, journalists are notorious for claiming that someone was dead when they were in a coma. The question is whether people who have been properly diagnosed as brain dead by qualified, experienced doctors can ever recover.

I worked for many years in an institution for the mentally retarded. Many patients were there due to brain damage. No such patients ever got better. Ever. It seems quite reasonable to me that since parts of the brain can be damaged and never recover that when crucial parts are gone, that's the end.

Whether or not current technology can accurately detect brain death or not, brain death is a real phenomena. Assume that in the future we have a perfect system for detecting brain death. We'll still be facing the challenge of families refusing to accept that fact and insisting that their loved one's body be kept going at the cost of several thousand dollars per day. Which they will expect someone else to pay. It;s never going to be an easy thing to deal with.

This is the sort of thing that we already covered. For example, in the Huffington Post article, "Because Burns did not meet all the criteria for brain death, staff diagnosed irreversible brain damage, according to the hospital's documentation." Yes, the journalists said "brain dead", but the person who recovered had not been declared "brain dead". Yes, there are thousands of cases of people who were falsely called brain dead by journalists or family, yet who later revived. And there have also been many people falsely declared dead or brain dead by inexperienced medical personnel or those without good equipment. The question is how many were certified brain dead by properly trained medical staff with good equipment and yet later revived. I'm not trying to be tricky here. I agree that it can be a difficult thing to figure out. Which is why there are so many honest mistakes. But I disagree with your statement, "There is no reliable technology capable of determining brain death." As with most of our debates, Zak, the subject is broad but all we can do is quote narrow examples to support our causes. I totally agree with you that there are thousands of people who later revive after being written off (for one reason or another). But the real question is whether they were truly brain dead or were merely misdiagnosed. Misdiagnoses of all sorts is a common problem in the medical field. In places like Texas, rural counties have elected-official coroners without any medical training who can legally declare someone dead. Granted, they usually confer with a local GP, if one is available, but few of those GPs have extensive emergency medical training or the equipment to do good death testing.

We often know when there's a not-dead mistake because the person revives, but how do we know when the diagnose is accurate and the person is truly brain dead? In other words, all examples will automatically come from the "not dead" box because those people revived. There's no follow-up on the "really dead" cases because they didn't. So I don't think we can answer this question by quoting sites and articles. Next subject? 8->

So is it your idea is that almost no one shall ever be declared dead? Hundreds of millions of bodies kept functioning by machines, just in case some of them might revive at some unspecified point in the future? 8->

As a practical matter, we have to have a definition of death. The current one may be imperfect, although I think it's more accurate than you do, but we have no realistic alternative. And, even if you're correct, we also have no way of knowing what the percentage of error is. Most people declared dead are autopsied or processed by morticians soon afterward. So we simply have no way of knowing whether 25% or 0.025% might have recovered if given the chance.

So there's no point in changing the current system, right? LOL.

I'm not certain, but I bet that the criteria over here varies from state to state. There's probably a national, "recommended" set of standards from the AMA or some such, but state law trumps.

Rural Texas is a great place to commit a murder. It's up to an elected official without legal or medical training, the coroner, to declare death and to declare whether a death is accidental, natural or murder. Unlike the TV show, CSI, most rural counties don't have the funds to run a full set of tests on every dead body, so they only check things superficially - unless there is suspicion of murder. If it looks like an accident to the country sheriff, that's good enough. (Of course, urban areas do better.) The majority population of Texas has been urban since 1945, but the state has 254 counties and most of them are rural. If there's someone you want to kill, go west, young man, go west. 8->

That's weird...around here, we think of Texas as South.

Texas is indeed the East. And the South. And the West. 8-D

The Coastal Plains are sort of like Florida and the rest of the Gulf Coast - shipping, boating, fishing, offshore oil rigs, etc. North of that, East Texas is sort of like the Deep South - lumber mills, coal mines, cotton farming, racism, etc. The Panhandle is sort of like Kansas - flat, dry and windy - few trees, but lots of religious fanatics. The lower Rio Grande valley is sort of like a Mexican jungle - they even have jaguars. Or used to. The West/Southwest is sort of like cowboy movies - dry canyons, mountains, mining, etc.

Ft Worth's motto is, "Where the West begins." In the post-civil war cattle boom, people rounded up wild cattle from the middle of Texas (near San Antonio) and drove them all the way up to Kansas, where the trans-continental railroad passed. Many a Western movie or TV series was based on this 20-years or so, before people started building fences and wouldn't like the cattle herds pass. Comanches used to raid down from the Panhandle into central Texas. There are some famous raids that happened only a couple of miles from where I live. When Texas was an independent nation, the wife of the French ambassador went mad worrying about Comanche raids. Bastrop (about 20 miles east of Austin) has a reenactment every year of a large battle where a bunch of citizens and Texas Rangers ambushed a large Comanche raiding party that was coming back from the coast with loot and captives.

Texas has it all - tornadoes, hurricanes, flash floods, droughts, forest fires, all 4 of North America's poisonous snakes and both of its poisonous spiders, plus one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the industrialized world, chemical pollution from the refineries along the coast, a large number of high-school dropouts, one of the highest percentages of minimum wage jobs in the US, urban drug gangs, a state government run by Tea Party crazies, and much more. Y'all come. LOL.