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Ethics Consultation: Persistent Brain Death and Religion: Must a Person Believe in Death to Die?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Jeffrey Spike  and
Jane Greenlaw
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Extract

We first heard about this case from nurses in one of our intensive care units (ICUs) while we were conducting an inservice. When the session was over, we discussed it between ourselves, and decided that it must have been misrepresented. The case had been presented as one of a teenager who was brain dead, had been so for six months, yet had been brought into the ICU for treatment. We have run into this before, we thought: medical professionals confusing brain death with persistent vegetative state (PVS). But, of course, we reasoned, no one can be brain dead for six months. To us, as it would to many, the case sounded like a clinical and ethical impossibility.

A week later, we were called by an attending physician from another ICU, at the urging of that unit's nursing staff. They had a patient who was brain dead, whose presence was causing distress among the staff. Ronald Chamberlain, a fifteen-year-old boy, had been a patient at a nearby longterm rehabilitation facility that is equipped to care for ventilator-dependent patients.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , Fall 1995 , pp. 291 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1995

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