Unsurprisingly, we don’t know as much about vegetative states as many think they do. Unfortunately, as with cryonics, a lot of the medical profession take the easy way out, ethically speaking.
7 thoughts on “Brain Dead, Or Just Resting?”
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Would this explain Biden?
We should use Joe Biden as an exemplar….
Then, of course, only just recently have we started to get an inkling of what’s really going on during general anesthesia. From what I’ve read, there’s a lot more to go to figure that out with some certainty.
I’ve heard (years ago taking a class as a hotline volunteer) that opiates like heroin and morphine don’t actually take away pain; they just make it so you don’t care. I’ve taken morphine at hospitals but I can’t really say one way or the other. I don’t think studies tend to focus on the person but rather on the easier observable results.
I’ve taken those classes in both CA and AZ. In the other (can’t remember which is which that was about 40 years ago) I learned that many police officers taking those classes subsequently became drug dealers (the economic incentives are wild and as a police officer you have a better chance of avoiding the downside.)
Having known a few people with serious injuries who wound up in the ER and were given morphine, yes, that rings true. Several of them remarked, “I was still in pain but I didn’t care.”
That….I don’t know, I tend not to think that’s a good pain “relief” model. Though maybe it’s the best that can be done at the time until the injury can be looked at.
Several of them remarked, “I was still in pain but I didn’t care.”
It’s hard to imagine what that means. I hope I never find out.
I’ve been there (a bad attack of kidney stone). Worst pain I ever felt. Then they plugged the IV in.
The description above is absolutely exact. I was expecting the pain to go away, but it didn’t. Not even dulled. But I felt indifferent to it, like it was happening to someone else, someone I didn’t know very well or particularly cared about.