Health Ethics

FINALS
Lesson no.3
Death

Introduction:
The fear of being alone and abandoned is one anxiety of the dying person.
Nothing is more inhuman than to let someone spend his last moments in life
alone, feeling like being the least important human being even to his loved ones
and friends.The fear to die is overcome when the dying patient knows or feels
the presence of others around him. For the presence of others is significant as it
fulfills the dying person needs to be with others especially during the last
moment of life. The caregiver provides this needs in a very special way.

Objective:
In view of this lesson, the student- caregiver provider will have learned to be more
sensitive, compassionate, and effective human instrument in the care of the dying
patient.

Definition of Death.
In spiritual sense, death is the separation of the body and soul of man.In
medical sense, death is the irreversible loss of the characteristics that are
essential significant to a living organism. This essential characteristics are
viewed in terms of the ability of the organism to assimilate, to grow, to
execute, and to reproduce.
What are those characteristics that are essentially significant to human
organism? Human organism is with life when the functioning of the
respiratory and circulatory systems are not irreversibly lost.

Two approaches to determining death,

1. That death sets in when the circulatory and respiratory systems fail to
function.. Under this view the heart stops to pump blood, death is confirmed
by the heart’s loss of its activity.
2. The other view, when the body irreversibly loses its capacity to integrate
body functions and to interact socially with others, when it no longer shows
conscious reflexes and ceases to be receptive or responsive to others.
This explains in a the term-
“Clinical dead”-the complete loss or cessation of heart and lung activity.
“Brain dead” refers to complete cessation or absence of cerebral activity
or transmittal of brain wave.
Student task- Ethical a reaction, whether or not to allow to withdraw
life-sustaining treatment from the patient in a persistent vegetative
state?