We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
1–10 of 61 posts
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#2The United States is quite large. Even 1 out of 50 is still a very large number. We have plenty of opportunities to learn everything necessary.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#3The United States is quite large. Even 1 out of 50 is still a very large number. We have plenty of opportunities to learn everything necessary.
If that 1 out of 50 was picked by random, then that might be correct, but the article makes it seem as though that isn't the case.
Since most of these autopsies are conducted when foul play is suspected or when the cause of death is unknown, that doesn't help doctors improve in the cases where they thought they knew the cause of death but were wrong.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#4How do I _prevent_ an autopsy from being performed on me?
As a cryonicist, I find what is being advocated for very scary...
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#5How do I _prevent_ an autopsy from being performed on me? As a cryonicist, I find what is being advocated for very scary...
Why would you?
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#6"Not really; not always; and sometimes not even with causes of death you’d think would show up easily in a good scan. Doctors take far too much confidence in scan results, feeling they see everything with certainty. They don’t. As a Florida coroner told me a few years ago, “We get this all the time. The doctors get our report and call and say, ‘But there can’t be a lacerated aorta. We did a whole set of scans.’"
I would note that postmortem scans, done once the patient is deceased, can be substantially higher fidelity, because there is no concern about radiation exposure in X-ray tomography of arbitrary contrast and number of slices, and after that metal bits can be removed at will for MRI of arbitrary strength, duration, and confinement on a nonmoving subject. Blood tests can be run in standard panels. DNA tests can reveal CoD correlations.
All of this, streamlined, without a surgical autopsy & reporting being performed, seems like a tractable middle ground.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#7How do I _prevent_ an autopsy from being performed on me? As a cryonicist, I find what is being advocated for very scary...
It is no longer "you" when your body is dead.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#8How do I _prevent_ an autopsy from being performed on me? As a cryonicist, I find what is being advocated for very scary...
You may not remember, but part of the cryo signup process involves declaring a religious objection to autopsy.[1] (No state has an irreligious objection to autopsy, but they don't ask for specifics.) In California, a court order is required to override it. I don't think that has ever happened. A medical examiner would only go to the courts if you were patient zero in some sort of outbreak.
1. http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/certificateofreligiousbeli...
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#9I understand that there are 1400 different brands of over-the-counter medication that contain acetaminophen.
That's what destroyed my father's liver.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#10I find this thought provoking. When my father-in-law died, the coroner declined to do an autopsy as he was over 70. Essentially, for anyone old enough, an autopsy is considered unnecessary as death isn't all that unlikely. In some respects, that is a sensible position. However, my father-in-law's death was slightly mysterious (in the medical sense; no suspicion of foul play) as he was extremely healthy and HIS father is still alive at 100.