281–290 of 337 posts
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Obviously everyone is different, but I have never thought of CPR as "brutal" for the provider. Exhausting, certainly, but not brutal.
For the provider, this was primarily a reference to the potential emotional rollercoaster of CPR (depending on how empathetic you are).
My Dad had a cardiac arrest at 70. And consequently deprived of oxygen for 10+ minutes. My Mom did all she could with chest pumps waiting for paramedics. This kept him alive so he made it to hospital. When I saw my Dad, a few hours later, his eyes were glazed over, pupils dilated, unable to make sort of recognizable sound, just soft nightmarish screams, and stretching out his arms like he wanted to get away. I though…
As a counter story I once attended a talk given by an A&E consultant who was a bit dismissive of the trend for putting in defibrillators everywhere, such as at sports stadiums. He said that by the time someone had rushed to wherever the device was kept, retrieved and used it, it was likely that, at best, you'd be looking at the casualty surviving in a persistent vegetative state. Incidentally, someone asked about hav…
EDIT: As an anecdotal example, I know of at least one person who is walking around today because of a defibrillator at a stadium. 17 year old male took a lacrosse ball to the chest, instantly triggering ventricular fibrillation[1]. The athletic trainer used an AED from the seating area and his heart was beating again before the ambulance arrived.
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> It’s definitely not evidence of wide scale Christian refusal to accept death. True if you are speaking only of the events you described. However you left out the national debate(and I use that word loosely) over the matter. That was evidence of wide scale Christian refusal to accept death. It took the typical form of the extremists appealing to and living under the shield of the larger group of religious believers…
The national debate was mostly pro-life groups trying to spin the situation for political gain. And even among those groups, I don't remember it being a common argument that she should live because God would miraculously heal her. The argument was that (they believed) she was still conscious and that her life was still worth living.
It was one of many arguments for continuing care. No, it wasn't the only argument, but I remember it being a fairly common one. I remember the dozens of websites popping up around the time and the frequent call for "prayer warriors."
there are still a few pages around, but a lot of them went away with the demise of Geocities, or just link rotted.
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When a family member actually says "If she dies, we aren't getting paid anymore." I've also talked to nurses who have approached the topic of hospice with family members, and there is an undeniable financial incentive in many cases.
And that only happens among Christians? Atheists and Muslims aren't motivated by money?
No.
The death of a family member can change the entire family dynamic, and greed is a powerful emotion that knows no political or religious boundaries.
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I grew up in a conservative, Protestant family and I might be able to shed a little bit of light on this. A few points, simply based on the environment I grew up in, which means of course this is just one perspective on just one religious denomination - I won't provide more caveats than that: - Christians take the afterlife very seriously. One must be judged by God. Regardless of how confident you are in your final d…
Good post. The third bullet point is accurate. But, maybe needlessly complicated... In short, the law is clear: Thou shalt not kill. If someone's life is in your hands, inaction -- such as not consenting to a feeding tube or repirator for your unconscious relative -- is ethically the same as actively killing them. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. But the qualms come from relatives not wanting to be responsible for killin…
I want to go out as a result of a series of violent mistakes trying to save my life. Why would anyone want anything else? Peaceful death is basically suicide. Why do doctors continually perpetuate this notion that slipping softly into death (palliative care, hospice) is preferable to continually trying to avoid it by way of riskier and riskier attempts at treating the root cause? At the very least, we could be honest…
>Why do doctors continually perpetuate this notion that slipping softly into death (palliative care, hospice) is preferable to continually trying to avoid it by way of riskier and riskier attempts at treating the root cause? Most end-of-life decisions don't involve an otherwise healthy young person who might expect another 50 or 60 years of good-quality life, they involve someone who has multiple serious health probl…
One significant problem, at least in my experience, is when doctors take that approach with someone, based primarily on their age and on inaccurate diagnoses, who has multiple serious health problems and does not die in the very immediate future.
The common view seems like an inversion of Blackstone's ratio (better to prematurely end the life of one individual than to let however many other individuals suffer). To be fair, as a personal point of view this is fine, but it may also merge with socio-economic constraints in a really ugly way. In addition, no one I've spoken to has made any effort to even consider and explore differences in how other people experience pain or view death.
When all is said and done, it can be a real shit show.
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And that only happens among Christians? Atheists and Muslims aren't motivated by money?
Did I say anything at all to insinuate that? No. The death of a family member can change the entire family dynamic, and greed is a powerful emotion that knows no political or religious boundaries.
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The answer to that is the concept of "can't" does not exist for God. Same as how the concept of alphabet does not apply to a number, or how you can't divide by zero. It's simply not a concept that can be applied.
If he literally created the universe and all the laws of nature, couldn’t he create such a concept?
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The national debate was mostly pro-life groups trying to spin the situation for political gain. And even among those groups, I don't remember it being a common argument that she should live because God would miraculously heal her. The argument was that (they believed) she was still conscious and that her life was still worth living.
>I don't remember it being a common argument that she should live because God would miraculously heal her. It was one of many arguments for continuing care. No, it wasn't the only argument, but I remember it being a fairly common one. I remember the dozens of websites popping up around the time and the frequent call for "prayer warriors." there are still a few pages around, but a lot of them went away with the demise…
Yes there were people praying for her to be fully healed, but there's a difference between believing it's possible to be healed and arguing that we should keep her alive primarily because of that possibility.
The focus of the argument was that her life was already worth living because they believed she was still conscious, and other sanctity of life issues. At the end, the most common argument was that it was cruel to deny someone food and water. They were talking about how the family couldn't even give her ice chips.
The pro feeding tube people believed she should keep being fed regardless of whether God was going to heal her.
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As far as I know (my wife is an emergency physician), despite what the name suggest, CPR is not really for "bringing back". Is a technique to keep the blood flowing so the brain doesn't suffer damage until other techniques are applied. Also, as she explained to me, the defibrillator is only used on certain kind of arrests, it can actually make things worse on others.
CPR circulates blood to the oxygen and brain, keeping it going long enough for the heart to (maybe) be restarted. For the first few minutes after someone's heart stops beating, it probably hasn't actually stopped, it is just beating in a chaotic way that isn't actually moving any blood (this is known as "ventricular fibrillation, hence the "defibrillator"). The electrical discharge of the defibrillator is like someon…
That's what I get for late night commenting...