UNITED STATES, August 8, 2018: Hinduism Today invites Hindus to send us their thoughts and research to letters@hindu.org on how to define “death” of the physical body in the Hindu tradition. As the following article by Radhika Viswanathan explains, it is a complex issue in today’s technologically advanced medical world and an issue–like taxes–that none of us will escape.
By Radhika Viswanathan, Vox.com
Turns out there’s no true consensus among doctors, bioethicists, and philosophers. The way death is determined can even change as you cross state lines. Is it when our brains completely shut down? Is it when parts of our brains stop working? Is it when our hearts or lungs stop working? Is it when we lose the ability to think? The line can be blurry, especially now that we have technology to keep organs functioning. Because of these artificial ways of sustaining life, differentiating death from life sometimes falls outside of the boundaries of science, according to Robert Veatch, professor emeritus of medical ethics at Georgetown University and the senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. “It reflects the intersection of medical science and philosophy and religion,” he said. Most recently, there was the case of 17-year-old Jahi McMath, who was first pronounced dead five years ago after a tonsillectomy in 2013 went awry and left her brain-dead. But McMath was connected to a ventilator, and her heart continued to beat (the heart has an internal pacemaker, so it needs only regular oxygen to beat). Her mother, grandmother, and other family members believed that this meant she was still alive, and fought to keep her connected to a ventilator. The story became the subject of a lengthy New Yorker profile by Rachel Aviv.
After doctors in California declared her dead, McMath was transported to a hospital in New Jersey, which kept her on the life-sustaining treatment until she finally died of liver failure on June 22. But the battle is not over yet. According to the New Yorker, the family, who is African American, felt they were discriminated against (racism, no doubt, runs deep through the American medical system). McMath’s family is currently planning to file a wrongful-death suit against the hospital that declared her brain-dead, as well as a federal civil rights case. Over the past few decades, other cases — like those of Terri Schiavo, Nancy Cruzan, Karen Ann Quinlan, and Marlise Munoz — have sparked similar national debates about what rights an unresponsive person has, what rights their families have, and what a hospital’s responsibility is.
Most death determination is left to medical professionals, as it should be. But in these rare cases of uncertainty, when death actually has room for interpretation and the patient’s wishes are unclear, family members sometimes feel doctors don’t give their opinions enough respect. Trying to understand what death means can help decide the best way to determine when someone has died. And beyond the medical ramifications, it turns out that untangling death actually tells us a lot about what it means to be alive.
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