How 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.
Legal death is not the same as biological death.
We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The main reason we do fewer autopsies is because of better diagnostics while the patient is alive. The article claims that "About 15 to 30 percent of the time, the diagnoses at time of death are wrong" .
Maybe, I haven't read the study, but there is a huge selective pressure here. That is, these days you tend to order autopsies only when there was something mysterious about the death.
> Maybe, I haven't read the study
I don't get that. If you haven't read the study, how can you comment on it?
I understand that you'd have your opinion canned and ready in the normal case but this study supposedly moves the needle and I'd be very interested on what it does to your position after you read the study, but without that it's as if you are rejecting out of hand any evidence the study might provide.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should health insurance cover autopsy? Given no chance of "recovery" from the condition, there's no health interest to the subscriber, right?
Not to the subscriber that has passed, but insurance companies may benefit from the knowledge acquired from autopsies. Analysis could reveal that if the company covered some drug/procedure, the overall usage rate per subscribe decreases, saving them money in the long run.
In an amoral economic sense, insurance companies don't profit by helping people eke out their problem-prone later years, versus helping generally-healthy people avoid death and stay customers.
There are probably scenarios where their best-case scenario is to say: "Oh well, I guess it was his time to go" and move on.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#54"In the United States, we usually don’t autopsy people unless the cause of death is mysterious or foul play is suspected." In any case, health insurance doesn't cover autopsy. Turns out its classified as postmortem to deny insurance coverage. there was an hour long special on NPR sometime in 2014.
Why should health insurance cover autopsy? Given no chance of "recovery" from the condition, there's no health interest to the subscriber, right?
An autopsy could reveal medical malpractice. As such, I could see that there might be a benefit for a life insurance company to cover a more detailed examination of the cause of death.
After all, the insurer has been harmed to the extent that between the actual demise of the insured and the statistically predicted time of death, they can no longer collect premiums and interest. And the insured has been harmed by being deprived of life during that same span.
But given that many doctors are covered by malpractice insurance from the same company or family of companies, that would be a case of taking from Peter to pay Paul. And it would probably line the pockets of lawyers and medical examiners to a greater extent than those who suffered the harm.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#55"Doctors, meanwhile, learned humility. If you’re a doctor, it’s one thing to know, as an abstract fact, that 10 or 20 percent of patients who seemed to die of heart attack actually died from pulmonary embolism. It is quite another to have a pathologist dissect one of your patients and tell you No, this woman you took care for 25 years, and whose husband you pass on the street each day, did not die of heart attack; sh…
In software development and system administration - automation, variables, and copy-paste (instead of retyping) can be used to remove the possibility for human error to occur. Instead of seeing the number "0x80007003" and accidentally retyping it as "0x80070003", we can just copy it, and paste it into the other system. Or have the systems talk to each other and take us out of the loop. How do we remove opportunities…
I worked for a medical software company for a couple of years a little while ago. One of the major ingredients in the mandatory corporate beverage was the concept of "patient safety".
As a severe simplification, you can think of the transition from older medical processes to newer ones as like pulling all the string parameters, string parsing, and string building out of old code and replacing it with strictly typed data. In doing so, you remove all errors generated by improperly formatted strings.
That, and barcoding every damned thing in the hospital.
For instance, you barcode the patient's wrist tag, and you barcode everything going out of the hospital pharmacy. When the nurses go into a room to administer a patient's meds, they scan the patient, and scan the medication. The scanner bleeps either a "yes, proceed" or a "WHOA WHOA WHOA, RIGHT THERE! WRONG MED OR WRONG PATIENT!"
That last measure alone saves thousands of lives every year.[0]
[0] This statistic is entirely made up, but sounds about right.[1]
[1] Fine. Sort through it yourself. This ought to get you started:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The main reason we do fewer autopsies is because of better diagnostics while the patient is alive. The article claims that "About 15 to 30 percent of the time, the diagnoses at time of death are wrong" .
Maybe, I haven't read the study, but there is a huge selective pressure here. That is, these days you tend to order autopsies only when there was something mysterious about the death.
As far as I understood, an "autopsy study" means a study where the researchers decide to perform an autopsy to all of patients in their sample. A quick googling seems to support this meaning, links below.
If this is the case, then the results do not contain the bias you are suggesting.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10877491
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18288887
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#57Load of BS!
This means we need more people dead (considering autopsy is done on every body), so that we get a chance to look at more bodies and hopefully reduce the death rate in the future!!??. Is it not same as having less people die now?
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#58Load of BS! This means we need more people dead (considering autopsy is done on every body), so that we get a chance to look at more bodies and hopefully reduce the death rate in the future!!??. Is it not same as having less people die now?
From the article, which you apparently didn't read:
In the United States, we usually don’t autopsy people unless the cause of death is mysterious or foul play is suspected. In fact, we autopsy less than 5 percent of all deaths.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe because it's completely off topic?
It isn't really off-topic, but he didn't show the connection. I'm starting to think a lot of what gets perceived as trolling is people trying to make a contribution but failing to show the connection from where the group is to where they are. Then the group comes down hard and then the "troll" gets defensive.
Thank you for taking the time to state this. I read what you wrote, then what OP wrote, and realized that you were very correct in my case. Have an upvote for both of you :).
@Michael - I suspect the downvoting is a reaction to your tone. The certainty with which you prevented your statement, along with its (on-the-surface) appearance of being unrelated to the conversation made it appear as if you had an axe to grind. The downvotes (I hope) were a (misguided) attempt to rectify this behavior.
I bet that a lot of people who downvoted you would have supported your comment if your words were changed a little so the tone came across more clearly. Something like, "I wish there had been an autopsy done on my father, who died of renal failure. He had been advised to take XYZ medication, much of which contained acetaminophen. His autopsy could have supported science that brought awareness of cumulative acetaminophen ingestion."
I am sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing your experience -- it led me to research acetaminophen toxicity, where I found out that the deaths caused may be greatly underreported due to a variety of factors. (http://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-behind-...)
Better post-mortem data from autopsies in cases like your fathers would go a long ways towards understanding the scope of the problem.
Re: We Need More Autopsies, to Help Save the Living
#60Load of BS! This means we need more people dead (considering autopsy is done on every body), so that we get a chance to look at more bodies and hopefully reduce the death rate in the future!!??. Is it not same as having less people die now?
From the article, which you apparently didn't read: In the United States, we usually don’t autopsy people unless the cause of death is mysterious or foul play is suspected. In fact, we autopsy less than 5 percent of all deaths.
From my comment, which you apparently didn't read:
> considering autopsy is done on every body
what I meant was, even if every body is autopsied, it wouldn't make sense