blog 21

            As seen in “Some Assembly Required”, a high school boy forcibly brings his rotting brother back from the dead. Obviously the procedure has been performed out of love, but was it fair to the already dead brother? This conflict occurs in our society today as well. Hospitals have adopted a policy in which they must assume patients want to be resuscitated unless the patient tells them otherwise. Dr. Howard Brody, a family practitioner and medical ethicist at the Michigan State University Clinical Center claimed in 2005, “Cardiac resuscitation is being widely misapplied and overused, leading to costly and sometimes painful efforts on patients who are unlikely to benefit. We've reached a point where almost no one is allowed to die in a U.S. hospital without resuscitation.” This means that no matter what, unless you are on record as a D.N.R (Do Not Resuscitate), you will be injected with adrenaline, violently pressed during CPR, or electrically jolted by a machine until you wake up. These procedures cost money that could go towards living patients with hope of a future, and are also extremely painful for the patient to experience. Some of these patients come back only to suffer brain damage and other ailments, and some simply go through more pain and then slip away. Is it fair to them? No. Was it fair to the dead brother? No, (hence the relevance to my paper). These are real life concepts that need to be addressed and handled accordingly. People are ripped from death and slung back into life without clear consent, and many of them later explain that they did not want to undergo that process.