chapter 17 Flashcards
What are the number of components that compose the death system in any culture?
- People
- Places or contexts
- Times (DATES)
- Objects
What does Kastenbaum also argue that the death system serves certain functions in a culture?
- Issuing warnings a predictions - weather, laboratory, etc
- preventing death - firefighters
- caring for the dying - hospice, doctors, nurses
- disposing of the dead - cremation, embalming,
- social consolidation after death - coping and adapting
- making sense of death
How can death be seen?
- punishment for one’s sins
- act of atonement
- judgement of a just god
The denial of death can take many forms including:
- Funeral industry to gloss over death and fashion lifelike qualities in the dead
- not using the word dead but saying “passing on” “exiting”
- Persistant search for fountain of youth
- rejection and isolation of the aged
- adoption of the concept of a good afterlife
- medical community prolonging life
more than ____% of Americans died in institutions and hospitals
80
What is brain death?
a neurological definition of death which states that a person is brain dead when all electrical activity of the brain has ceased for a specified period of time
The definition of brain death currently followed by most physicians includes the irreversible death of both the higher cortical functions and the lower brain stem functions
What part of the brain dies sooner than other?
The higher portions of the brain often die sooner than the lower portions.
Because the brain’s lower portions monitor heartbeat and respiration, individuals whose higher brain areas have died may continue breathing and have a heartbeat
What is advance care planning?
The process of patients thinking about and communicating their preferences about end-of-life care
What is an advance directive?
a living will - states such preferences as whether life-sustaining procedures should or should not be used to prolong the life of an individual when death is imminent
What is Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST)?
a document that is more specific than an advanced directive.
POLST translates treatment preferences into medical orders such as those involving cardiopulmonary resuscitation, extent of treatment, and artificial nutrition via a tube
What is euthanasia? What are the two types?
(“easy death”) is the act of painlessly ending the lives of individuals who are suffering from an incurable disease or severe disability
Passive and Active euthansia
What is passive euthanasia?
The withholding of available treatments, such as life-sustaining devices, and allowing the person to die.
**Not having a ventilator
What is active euthanasia?
Death induced deliberately, as when a physician or a third party ends the patient’s life by administering a lethal dose of a drug.
What is assisted suicide?
Occurs when a physician supplies the information and/or the means of committing suicide (such as giving the patient a prescription for a lethal dose of sleeping pills) but requires the patient to self-administer the lethal medication and to determine when and where to do this
What’s the difference between assisted suicide and active euthanasia?
assisted suicide differs from active euthanasia, in which a physician causes the death of an individual through a direct action in response to a request by the person