Doctors saying brain dead; patients saying otherwise

[Barack_America]

144. Only physicians can pronounce people dead.

That's the law. Take it up with your legislators if you think every citizen has the right to declare others deceased.

I must have missed it, you have an issue with MRI? Sure they're expensive and overused, but the quality of the images is very good.

That's an interesting article, but extremely scant on the details. Brain death is not defined as flatlined EEG, and such a finding is not sufficient to declare brain death. I don't see anywhere a discussion that the reflexes that brain death is actually predicated on we're also absent. Interestingly, reading the original article (of which this sensationalized piece is based), they make no claims of life after brain death, rather merely a reiteration of why EEG cannot diagnose brain death.

From that article:

The results presented here challenge the common wisdom that the isoelectric line is always associated with absent cerebral activity, and demonstrate that the isoelectric line is not necessarily one of the ultimate signs of a dying brain. We show that if cerebral neurons survive through the deepening of coma, then network activity can revive during deeper coma than the one accompanying the EEG isoelectric line by the change in the balance of hippocampal-neocortical interactions

That's what they claim the study shows, nothing more. The rest was dreamed up by this "verge" piece.