Defining death take 2

As a physician, one of the actions we have to take is to pronounce someone's death. Now this is not as straight-forward as it seems to be. You could maybe attempt to check the patient's vital signs mainly respiratory movements, pulse. But when these stop, as in a respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest, not only this doesn't mean death in most cases, but on the contrary it means that emergency measures may be indicated to revert the condition and trying to keep the person alive, and with a quality of life. So what I'm saying is that at the moment of the arrest his neurons, myocites are still alive and have potential to stay alive.
These emergency measures are an attempt to get new oxygen into your blood and to get your blood flowing in your body taking that oxygen to your organs.
So that doesn't count as death. Patients can also be kept alive through mechanical ventilation, through drugs that keep their blood pressure at a minimum to oxygenate their organs, in hopes that the condition that led them to need these measures will be reversible and the patient will be able to maintain his blood pressure without drugs and be able to breath well without help from a respirator.
Sometimes this condition is not reversible, such as a damage so severe to the brain that there is no hope. In this kind of patient, for example young people who suffer from car accidents, their hearts have no disease and could be kept alive indefinitely with mechanical aid. But sometimes, this patient may brain dead. So maybe this is the best definition of death. How to define this is not easy as well. Because of organ donation, rigid protocols have been estabilished. They usually involve the observation of the absence of primitive reflexes and more elaborate exams such as an electroencephalogram or as my previous post a functional MRI attested by more than one physician.

Visitors!

Hey this is so cool! I just installed statcounter to see what goes on, since nobody has ever left a comment for me. And with just a few days I've had a few visitors.
Thank you very much for your visits! I have even been inspired to write a longer essay about one of the searched topics!

Trust them.

Diebold's election system computers are easily hackable in less than a minute. Makes you wonder if the brazillian version of it (the "urna eletrônica") is any better. In Brazil we have one sole device that is used in the entire nation. Results come up in a couple of hours as 3.5" disk are launched onto the grid. What if somehow these computers can be tampered in the same way? I'm also very surprised at the almost ravenous reaction of diebold, it's almost as if they're saying they're guilty.

How to define death.

As technologies advance further and further something that seems so simple as to say if somebody is dead or not becomes more and more complicated. Enter functional-MRI into the picture.
For people who came into my blog though I wrote a little bit more here.