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eBook details

• Title: Brain Death Without Definitions.
• Author : The Hastings Center Report
• Release Date : January 01, 2005
• Genre: Life Sciences,Books,Science & Nature,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 186 KB

Description

Until recently, "brain death" was widely regarded as one of the crowning conceptual achievements of bioethics. After all, less than four decades after the whole-brain criterion of death was first proposed, it has come to supplant the traditional, cardiopulmonary criterion of death throughout much of the world. Not only doctors but also lawmakers and religious authorities have embraced the view that we die when our brains irreversibly cease to function, not, as earlier times had it, when our hearts and lungs irreversibly cease to function. This revolution in our thinking about human death has had profound practical implications. It has opened the way to vital organ donation and unilateral withdrawal of treatment from patients with beating hearts but no hope of recovering brain function. In recent years, however, the whole-brain criterion of death has come under increasing criticism, and a growing consensus has developed among bioethicists and philosophers that brain death is actually incoherent. While the proponents of brain death have typically defended it on the grounds that the brain is necessary for the integrated functioning of the organism as a whole, recent findings appear to contradict this claim. (1) Furthermore, extensive study of the "brain dead" has shown that even after the standard battery of diagnostic tests for brain death has been fulfilled (including documentation of coma, the absence of brainstem reflexes, and the absence of respiratory effort), many brain functions persist--including such presumably integrative functions as hormone secretion and thermoregulation. (2)

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