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Yeah the poster talking about “coding” is talking a bit of nonsense. “Coding” here is slang for “code blue” which is an American medical euphemism for cardiac arrest or medical emergency. Code blue is partially used to not cause alarm with patients (for example if tanoyed or if people overheard staff) and medical staff are familiar with it because its common in the US system. “Coding” is just a slang that medical staff say to each other and is a quasi medical term; its not an official term and would not be written in peoples notes for example.
And it is not an universal term. In the UK we call a cardiac arrest a cardiac arrest and put out an “arrest call”. It is unambiguous and doesnt fall into a trap of creating other “codes” that become confusing. Similarly we have Trauma Calls for trauma teams and so on.
Some US hospitals apparently use a range of codes like code purple, code white, code gray etc. To my knowledge its not even standardised in the US or often between nearby hospitals (although code blue wouldn’t have other meanings). I wouldn’t be surprised if some US hospitals also don’t use code blue at all anymore because it is unnecessarily ambiguous.
The heart beating is not a good definition of being alive in my opinion. The heart stopping temporarily doesn’t mean you died, you were just in terribly grave danger.
If a person is defined by their heart, what does that make a heart transplant?
utterly useless definition.
no, we should use the heart beating as a definition. why? because then I can say I’m undead and have died twice. that’s very cool 😎 pls don’t take that away from me 🥺 :(
As an old and now retired medic. My personal definition of dead was if you made into the back of my amp-a-lamps or not. If you did you weren’t dead-- you were merely having a bit of a bad day. I might have needed to do your breathing for you and I might have needed to make your heart pump blood. But until some doctor somewhere decided you weren’t worth his time and effort, you were still alive. Because I don’t haul dead people.
So, by my definition as a trained and professional medical person, you where never dead-dead. Just someone have a bad day among many others having a bad day at that time.
But if you’ve died, then were undead, and then died again, you’d be un-undead right? So alive? It’s basic double jeopardy.
You put the double ‘un’ but forgot the double ‘dead’.Oh, I didn’t realise you were actually catching the thing mid statement.
Still:
- A dead un-dead would be a re-dead, not very alive
- Considering the 2x dead person is still capable of commenting, I would assume it came back after re-death and is now in some other condition.
We are all the cardiac system of Theseus on this glorious day.
My heart stops after every beat. Fortunately it has always started again before the next one…so far.
We use a lot to define being alive not just the heart. The heart stopping is just an easy way to pronounce someone dead. What you described is called a pause. Not really the same thing. Brain death is also a thing. Any organ transplant allows you to function when otherwise you wouldn’t be able to.
I meant like, when someones heart stops and gets restarted again with cpr or a defibrillator or something. People often call that being dead, and coming back.
So if someones heart stops we don’t actually shock them. That’s a medical show myth. We shock them if they’re in something called a lethal rhythm. Which is the heart beating but not actually pumping blood. Very similar to the heart stopping and will eventually lead to the heart giving out. CPR keeps the blood flowing which keeps oxygen moving throughout the body preventing permanent damage. We give medications to restart the heart. They don’t really die until these interventions are stopped. Some people also have a pacemaker that detects their heart going into a lethal rhythm and will take over the electrical impulse until their heart goes back to normal. By the definition of the heart stopping this person would technically die and be brought back too. So I see what you’re saying but I wanted to add some context that this is pretty complex. Even more so when you bring in people deciding when they don’t want these interventions.
CPR doesn’t bring a decompensated body back to life. You gotta figure out the problem in order to do that and fix it. That’s what the algorithms we use in a code is for (as opposed to the algorithms you guys code). That’s the real esoteric necromancy. Epi, bicarb, epi.
https://hospitalhandbook.ucsf.edu/04-comprehensive-acls-algorithm/04-comprehensive-acls-algorithm
But they are literally dead
Not having a heartbeat and not breathing doesn’t mean you’re dead. Intensive care departments are literally full of people with medically paralysed breathing muscles (i.e. not breathing) on ventilation machines. People go onto heart/lung bypass machines everyday to have heart surgery and their heart is stopped. You just need to keep oxygenated blood going around, keeping those tissues alive till you get the heart and breathing back online (this is what CPR is trying to do).
When the brain stem is dead tissue, then you’re truly dead (but even then you can be kept “alive” artificially if you’re already on a ventilation machine in a suitable intensive care).
When your heart stops, you are considered dead no matter how viable your brain tissue is.
Source: I have pronounced many persons dead.
