A brain-dead person is still a life.
Referring to an old article dated sept 27 2003, "Brain-dead is dead - but maybe not for loved ones", I am going to comment about respect we should give to a brain-dead person when prologing lives of others.
People consider brain-dead person has no life because they believe that human brain is the "mastermind"of an entire body. If brain does not work anymore, the body has no life even though his heart is still beating. However, there is no convincing scientific evidence to prove that brain contain soul of a human body. Scientists have cut open human brain to look for memory, feeling of a person. Eventually, they failed as they saw nothing else other than layers of brain tissues. So where is the soul? How sure can you confirm that brain-dead is equivalent to end-of-life for a living thing?
Brain, and so are other organs, functions to allow the soul control the body properly. If one of the organ is dead, leaving the person in coma, how can we come to a hasty judgement that the body has "no life", while other organs are still working properly? Buddhists believe that soul will completely leave a body after it is dead for 12 hours. To maximise successful rate of an transplanting operation, doctors will usually cut out the organs immediately after his death. Some doctors in U.S. even inject drugs into the patients to keep other organs alive but to hasten heart-death. Such acts, not only deprive the patients of chances of getting alive, it also unnaturally hasten death of the person.
You may ask how can doctors deprieve patients of any hope of survive since they already "dead". Well, there are many occassion where patients become fully conscious after being diagnosed brain-dead. The most recent news I have heard of was a taiwanese old man who woke up in his coffin during funeral ceremony. This shows that brain-death does not neccessaily connote to end-of life.
Hence, if we respect every life in the world, we should also respect those lives whose organs are damaged but still stand a chance to recover.
People consider brain-dead person has no life because they believe that human brain is the "mastermind"of an entire body. If brain does not work anymore, the body has no life even though his heart is still beating. However, there is no convincing scientific evidence to prove that brain contain soul of a human body. Scientists have cut open human brain to look for memory, feeling of a person. Eventually, they failed as they saw nothing else other than layers of brain tissues. So where is the soul? How sure can you confirm that brain-dead is equivalent to end-of-life for a living thing?
Brain, and so are other organs, functions to allow the soul control the body properly. If one of the organ is dead, leaving the person in coma, how can we come to a hasty judgement that the body has "no life", while other organs are still working properly? Buddhists believe that soul will completely leave a body after it is dead for 12 hours. To maximise successful rate of an transplanting operation, doctors will usually cut out the organs immediately after his death. Some doctors in U.S. even inject drugs into the patients to keep other organs alive but to hasten heart-death. Such acts, not only deprive the patients of chances of getting alive, it also unnaturally hasten death of the person.
You may ask how can doctors deprieve patients of any hope of survive since they already "dead". Well, there are many occassion where patients become fully conscious after being diagnosed brain-dead. The most recent news I have heard of was a taiwanese old man who woke up in his coffin during funeral ceremony. This shows that brain-death does not neccessaily connote to end-of life.
Hence, if we respect every life in the world, we should also respect those lives whose organs are damaged but still stand a chance to recover.
posted by Anonymous @ 18:49
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