Brain Death

555 Words2 Pages

There are many legal aspects that go into declaring what is and what is not brain death. In today’s society, many people, including medical professionals, judges and attorneys struggle to identify what exactly constitutes as brain death. According to, Smith“ the concept of brain death came about during the 1950’s when, as a consequence of developments in critical care, clinicians were faced for the first time with the prospect of an apparently ‘alive’ patient sustained by mechanical ventilation long after brain function had ceased”(Smith, 2011).
The confusion as what exactly constitutes as brain death arises because brain death can be defined in more than one way. For instance, brain death can be classified as either the brain as a whole or the brain-stem. However, the Uniform Determination of Death Act states that, “an individual that has sustained irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain-stem, is dead” (Manara, Murphy & O’Callaghan, 2011). The brain-stem is the part of the brain between the spinal chord and diencephalon and consists of thr...

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