The processes of human life are sustained by many factors, but oxygen is the key to life. Respiration and blood circulation provide the body's cells with the oxygen needed to perform their life functions. When an injury or a disease compromises respiration or circulation, a breakdown in the oxygen supply can occur. As a result, the cells, deprived of essential life-sustaining oxygen, deteri…
Advances in medical science have complicated the definition of death. Life-saving measures such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) or defibrillation (electrical shock) can restart cardiac activity. The development of the mechanical respirator in the 1950s also prompted a change in the concept of death. An unconscious patient, unable to breathe without assistance, could be kept alive with a res…
In 1981 the President's Commission published Defining Death: Medical, Legal and Ethical Issues in the Determination of Death (http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/past_commissions/defining_death.pdf). In its report to President Ronald Reagan and the Congress, the Commission proposed a model statute, the Uniform Determination of Death Act, the guidelines of which would be used to define death: T…
The term "near-death experience" was first used by Dr. Raymond Moody in Life after Life (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1976), a compilation of interviews with people who claimed to have come back from the dead. A decade earlier, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross investigated out-of-body episodes recounted by her patients. The near-death experience is not a phenomenon limited to modern tim…
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