This isn't an April's fool thing, or is it? Can't help worrying. The FReepers are going on about deleting the check on their driver's licenses. Anyway, looks like I really must write down and sign a statement that I want to be considered dead when I'm brain dead. This may not be considered commonsensical anymore.
See
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0405/medicine.men040105.php3From the article:
"Almost four decades ago, the fallacious concept of "brain death" was introduced to pry open the legal doors to the killing of another group of unnoticed innocents — people who agree to donate their vital organs at death. <snip>
Obviously, removing a person's beating heart kills that person. Sometimes the heart is transplanted and beats on in another person. So, is it OK to take a beating heart from one person, as long as that person is declared brain dead, and transplant it in someone else who might die without it? <snip>
We say "No." In a culture of life, the answer would tend in the direction of preserving rather than taking life."
Any doctors here that can comment on the veracity of this part:
"When a person is truly dead, the brain cells don't generate nerve impulses or EEG signals. But the converse, that no brain signals means no life, isn't true. Many people with brain trauma or oxygen deprivation such as from a stroke or water filling the lungs (pulmonary edema) have had no detectable brain waves yet regain full consciousness later once oxygen returns to the cells. In these people, brain cells are temporarily too weak to generate nerve impulses or EEG signals."
The Pedestrian
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