Death, Brain Death, and Persistent Vegetative State
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چکیده
For most of human history, there was no perceived problem in determining whether a person was alive or dead. If the person had stopped breathing and had no heartbeat, he was considered dead. During the twentieth century, however, techniques were developed that made it possible to resuscitate some people who had stopped breathing and whose heart had stopped beating. With the invention of mechanical ventilation, oxygen could be forced in and out of the lungs of people unable to breathe on their own, and in many cases this has been sufficient to stimulate the person's heart to beat and thus to maintain the functioning of the body as a whole for an indefinite period, even in the absence of any indications of consciousness. At the same time that increasing numbers of mechanically ventilated but unconscious patients began to divert medical resources away from people who could have benefited from them more, there was also a growing demand for organs for newly-developed transplant surgeries. These conditions prompted a debate in medical circles about how to determine when a patient had died and could thus be removed from expensive life-support systems, thereby making both the support systems and the patient's organs available to others. This debate resulted in a surprisingly abrupt transition from universal acceptance of the traditional cardio-pulmonary criterion of death to near-universal acceptance of brain death. Brain death is understood as the irreversible cessation of functioning in the brain as a whole. It is compatible with the presence of isolated instances of minor, residual functioning in certain areas of the brain. The practical utility of this criterion was
منابع مشابه
Death, Brain Death, and Persistent Vegetative State The Concept of Brain Death and its Appeal
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تاریخ انتشار 2010