Death Photos of Celebrities 2013 : Death Photo

Thursday 21 November 2013

Death Photo

Death Photo Definition

Source:- Google.com.pk

At what point does a person actually die? That depends on who you ask. To one person, it's the moment the heart stops beating. To another, it's when the brain enters a "vegetative" state. But a heart can be forced to keep beating; and how dead is a person, really, if she can continue to grow, develop, and even give birth after experiencing "brain death"?

In search of answers, we turned to Dick Teresi. A seasoned science writer and the former editor of Science Digest and Omni, Teresi has spent the last ten years researching and writing about the science behind the line that separates life and death. He has recounted his findings and experiences in his new book, The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers — How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death. I've been a science writer since 1973, covering a lot of particle physics, and I've discovered that compared to, say, physics, "medical science" is an oxymoron. Doctors are not well schooled in scientific principles. They are healers, not scientists, and they don't understand basic concepts such as falsification in science. For example, doctors believe that if drug A heals 9 out of 10 people with disease X, then drug A heals disease X because it usually does. A scientist, on the other hand, believes that one exception destroys the whole theory.More to the point, take brain death. Some patients are declared brain dead and then begin spontaneously breathing hours later. Medical scientists say it doesn't matter because most brain-dead patients do not come back to life, but a rigorous scientist would say that these cases speak loudly about the flaws in our criteria for death. And yes — death to a cardiologist means that your heart has stopped, and he can't get it to restart. But to a neurologist, it might mean something else. In 1968, a committee at Harvard Medical School put forth an article stating that there is a second kind of death: brain death. Even though your heart is still pumping, and you're still able to breathe on a ventilator, if your
brain stem is down, you're dead. This theory was made law in all 50 states in 1981, so now in the U.S. we have two kinds of death: real death (cardiopulmonary death) and what some doctors call "pretty dead," or brain death. A cell biologist, on the other hand, may have a standard more rigorous than cardiologists or neurologists. They might want to see all one's cells dead, which we call putrefaction.
Since the beginning of recorded history, we have looked for a simple set of criteria that tell us when a person is dead. This is because we don't like to bury or cremate people if they're still alive, among other reasons. We have looked for a central organ that spells the difference between life and death, or a set of behaviors that indicate with certainty that our bodies have called it quits.

But every time we think we have solid criteria, we find exceptions. The ancient Egyptians, for example, thought the brain was totally unimportant, and they hollowed out the skulls of mummies, tossing the brain away. They concentrated on the heart. But stopped hearts often restarted spontaneously, and embalmers who declared live persons dead were stoned.

The Romans came up with "conclamation," which involved yelling a person's name in his ear three times — hardly a foolproof method. Inventions like the stethoscope helped immensely because some heartbeats and breaths are faint. Artificial respiration, smelling salts, and electric shock resuscitated people previously thought dead. Medical journals continue to fill with conditions that mimic death but which are not death at all.
Definitions of death have not changed a great deal, but that doesn't mean much. Often we'll say "death is the absence of life," but then we have to define "life" and that's almost impossible. All we can really do is set criteria for who's dead, and that is tough enough, and we have no real definitive set of standards.
What science looks for is stable systems. We can say the solar system or the hydrogen atom is stable. Death comes, we might say, when the stability of the human body breaks down, and the system no longer works as a whole. Does that happen when the heart goes? The lungs? The lungs and heart together? The brain? That's the debate. We are acquiring more and more evidence that the body can go on in a somewhat stable system long after the brain has called it quits. For example, brain-dead pregnant mothers can continue to gestate and give birth to their babies long after being declared brain dead. In one case, a mother went 107 days after "death," and then delivered a healthy newborn.