Call for vaccine opt-out penalty

[469er]

Originally Posted by Pammy

The same mistrust in the medical system is probably mostly accountable for not more people registering to be organ donors (they fear their organs will be taken before they are dead).

Really??? Is that what people are really worried about? I feel a bit ignorant now! I've carried a donor card since I was a little girl, and it's never once occurred to me my organs might be harvested before I was really dead. Where do people get these ideas from?

[Arch_Angel]

Originally Posted by 469er

Really??? Is that what people are really worried about? I feel a bit ignorant now! I've carried a donor card since I was a little girl, and it's never once occurred to me my organs might be harvested before I was really dead. Where do people get these ideas from?

Ahem This is where my extra reading into the morbid and obscure comes into play.

Indeed by the definitions of 50 years ago organs are almost always taken out when the person is "still alive". Organ donation was the very reason we redefined death from cardio-pulmonary to brain death / upper brain death.

For example a person with a destroyed upper brain will never wake up, and in my accounts have ceased to be a person at all. Peter Singer brings up the issue of declaring these people dead....yes, they may be breathing, but as a "person" they are dead. However, could you live with yourself burying a breathing human? (A question he asks to see where we can draw the line emotionally). Some of these people don't need any machinary to breath, those functions are regulated by more primitive parts of the brain (like when you're asleep). They are "alive" but no longer have any self / identity, no understanding of the world, no sensory inputs or higher neurological processes, they are not a "person" ..."they" (if "they" as an entity is still a vaild concept) are an unanimated human body (of course this is just my view).

Also, I'm not sure if you're allowed to cut organs out of the breathing brain dead.....but you certainly are out of the ventilated brain dead

Organ transplant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To have a viable organ donation system we need to be able to get at the organs before they begin to die themselves, espesially the heart, so by all means we take them from what some people would consider "live" people.

Of course some people don't understand this and see it as people being killed for other people...."human bodies" are killed "people" aren't.

I like this stuff

[469er]

Originally Posted by Arch_Angel

Peter Singer brings up the issue of declaring these people dead....yes, they may be breathing, but as a "person" they are dead. However, could you live with yourself burying a breathing human? (A question he asks to see where we can draw the line emotionally). Some of these people don't need any machinary to breath, those functions are regulated by more primitive parts of the brain (like when you're asleep). They are "alive" but no longer have any self / identity, no understanding of the world, no sensory inputs or higher neurological processes

Yes, I find all this stuff very interesting too. For me, watching a close relative being slowly dismantled by dementia was very instructive in developing my personal conception of where to draw the line between human bodies and human beings. It was also the point at which I finally completely abandoned any idea of a 'soul' - not that I had really believed in one before, but I'd enjoyed toying with the idea of it occasionally. Interestingly, Peter Singer's own stance on this stuff falls apart somewhat when you bring his own mother, who has/had dementia, into the equation - his ideas about what constitutes 'quality of life' suddenly get radically revised downwards!

Mind you, totally, utterly, honest-to-god dead people are hard to get your head round too. I did work experience in a mortuary last year, and it was just so hard to believe they were never going to walk/talk/breathe again. The idea of someone who's there... but not... is very, very difficult to accommodate, unless, perhaps, you have been well exposed to death from an early age. So I guess it's not so hard to take a short hop from there to imagining that taking organs out might turn out to have been the wrong thing to have done...

I like this stuff

What, dead people?

[Singh.Simran]

I don't know, i think not getting too attached to life might help. Not...finding it to be anything more than it is, a fortuitious series of reactions. Wasn't it mark twain who said he wouldn't mind death since he was dead for billions of years before and he damm sure would be afterwards?

Amusing but interesting.. I think if we are to justify eating (anything) really and so on, we can justify using someone who will never regain consciousness as a resource. But at the same time we should attempt to improve our field such that they might.

Some article touched on immortality the other day and i was wondering - though it's of course a noble aim and it would be brilliant to remove death, is it unethical to increase the already far too high strain on the world by doing so?

[Arch_Angel]

Yea, going completely off topic here, I was wondering the other day about when people say they want to commit suicide if they get a terminal illness etc.

If I were to come down with a disease that would eventually change my personality completely (some neurodegenerative diease of some sort - kuru maybe ) do I actually have authority now to give a advanced order on what I want to be done?

Say we make euthanasia legal and you can request to be euthanased if you become acutely demented (for example)....well....do we actually have the right to request that? Usually I'm all for personal choice, but has our current personality already died and given way to a new one, one that we now don't have the right to dictate the future of?

If you've ever read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintanence" there's a non-overlapping duel personality issue, and it got me thinking, regardless of the mental state of the latter one, does the former one have the right to dictate what should happen, especially with regard to induced death?

Of course you can also argue from the stance that you're not the same person every time you wake up and this is just a logical extension of that, but an interesting topic I think.

We're not really given the language or social background to deal with people's personalities dying....so it might come out as confusing and slightly garbled as I try and explain what I mean, but should we give "ourselves" the power of life and death over what our body may become in the future in a way totally removed from our current consciousness? Is it any different giving an advanced directive on yourself in a state of dementia to giving one on someone else?...or one on a child that was born with mental retardation?

[Pammy]

469er - you did work experience in a mortuary? Did you request that, or were you instructed to? I've never heard of anyone doing this...!

One thing that I've been thinking of a lot in connection with euthanasia is from what point people's personalities change sufficiently to be classed as "incompetent to make a decision"? When people are ill - even when they are not terminally ill - they often behave very differently from when they are healthy...e.g. you observe aggressive behaviour, or lethargy, and you are surprised by hearing people say things that you think they wouldn't "normally" say...Hence, when evaluating whether people can make the decision - do you just take into account the fact that they appear "rational", or would you take into account the fact that they seem to actually have changed their behaviour/personality (even if they don't suffer from dementia or anything like that)? In this sense, it might be of advantage to have advance directives...But what if the illness actually makes some people change their mind, so their advance directives are contradicted? Perhaps whilst they were healthy they couldn't put themselves into the situation of being this ill?

[Arch_Angel]

Ah yes, but they are still the same "person", even if they are a bit different. For example if I lost both my legs tomorrow, i'd probably be pretty annoyed for a while (although oddly studies apparently show that you don't suffer any long term change in mood - don't ask for them, i don't know where I heard it) but i'd just be me without legs. However, if I was hit by lightning and it completely lost my memory and I started out as a completely new person (effectively) should the old legal directives still have power? Or have "I" died and a new outward manifestation of my neurons awoken?...obviously no one is going to euthansase a confused amnesiac just because there's a document that allows it in certain situations, but it does bring up questions about continuity of personhood through events like these, including severe old age senile dementia. Is the person the same one that actually signed the document?

[Rich' Trash]

-editting-
-update: 20 mins later, forum ****ed up and I lost all the stuff I editted in.. cant be arsed typing it all over again-

[agneishd]

Originally Posted by Singh.Simran

I don't know, i think not getting too attached to life might help. Not...finding it to be anything more than it is, a fortuitious series of reactions. Wasn't it mark twain who said he wouldn't mind death since he was dead for billions of years before and he damm sure would be afterwards?

Amusing but interesting.. I think if we are to justify eating (anything) really and so on, we can justify using someone who will never regain consciousness as a resource. But at the same time we should attempt to improve our field such that they might.

Some article touched on immortality the other day and i was wondering - though it's of course a noble aim and it would be brilliant to remove death, is it unethical to increase the already far too high strain on the world by doing so?

trust me sim, one can go nuts thinking 'bout all this stuff

like thinking 'bout how after death, life and the whole universe still goes on, and you never come back, and what happens? no one really knows...

i've also thought that maybe i'm the only one alive, and everyone acts around me, and all history is just told to set the scene... but then again i'm sure loads of people have thought this too

[469er]

Originally Posted by Pammy

469er - you did work experience in a mortuary? Did you request that, or were you instructed to? I've never heard of anyone doing this...!

I just wrote and asked if I could come in and help with PMs. I had never seen a dead body before, and figured the first week of medical school wouldn't be the best time to find out I couldn't handle it. I thought it would be hard to arrange, but they were totally cool about it (all that refrigeration, I guess ) though they did make me jump through some administrative hoops - I had to provide references, a copy of my CRB and arrange personal insurance.

It was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had - very tough, but very worthwhile. I learned loads, on all kinds of different levels. At some point when I have time (TM) I keep meaning to submit an article about it to somewhere or other. I would really like to get into writing about the social/philosophical side of medical issues throughout my time as a student (and beyond, I hope obviously). Not quite sure what would be a suitable vehicle for that, though. Will think about it some more when I have a second. Back to stroke prevention this afternoon.

Woah, have gone seriously off topic now!