Society and Culture
Research by Dr. Eelco Wijdicks on the depiction of comas in movies was published in Neurology in May 2006. Dr. Wijdicks studied 30 films (made between 1970 and 2004) that portrayed actors in prolonged comas, and he concluded that only two films accurately depicted the state of a coma victim and the agony of waiting for a patient to awaken: Reversal of Fortune (1990) and The Dreamlife of Angels (1998). The remaining 28 were criticized for portraying miraculous awakenings with no lasting side effects, unrealistic depictions of treatments and equipment required, and comatose patients remaining muscular and tanned.
For decades, medical personnel and others have fought, and continue to fight, to define the circumstances for which a patient is “dead”. Society places a lot of importance on the idea of “brain death” because most “industrialized countries have equated this with death of the individual”. However, according to Rady and coworkers, “ human death is a singular phenomenon characterized by irreversible cessation of all vital functions (circulation, respiration, and consciousness)”. This means that death may be consisted of much more than just the brain’s inability to function. For example, although a patient may be “brain dead”, they may still be considered alive because they can still grow and even reproduce.
Read more about this topic: Coma
Famous quotes containing the words society and/or culture:
“The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)