Medicine needs to conduct rational and scientific analysis to demonstrate this. After research by many medical scientists, a consensus in the medical circle has been reached. For those patients whose spontaneous breathing and heartbeat cannot recover after the machine is removed, it turns out that the most important part of the brain, the brainstem, is dead and cannot be reversed by medical means, so they are called brain death.
Medical scientists have discovered again that ischemia and hypoxia can lead to brain death. If rescued in time, the brain can be reperfused with blood and nutrients within a certain period of time, and it is possible to restore functions and avoid brain death.
To sum up, there is a time lag between brain death. During resuscitation, it is right to use the machine to save brain cells. If the machine has been on for a long time but the patient has never been able to resume spontaneous breathing and heartbeat, the brain is dead, and the person is still dead.
The debate about brain death then comes back to how long this time difference is. The length of this time gap is the reason why various opinions in society collide. If you have no scientific way to determine the length of this time difference for a specific individual, you may misjudge the patient's death.
In statistics, some big data cannot be specifically classified into individuals. For some people, the time difference is longer, and for some people, the time difference is shorter. Don't underestimate the time difference of one minute and one second, it can really mean the difference between life and death.
In order to have sufficient factual evidence for brain death, we must go back to the starting point. Doctors need to find evidence to prove that the patient's brain is dead, rather than just looking at time.
In the past, neurologists had expertise in this area and were the most qualified to find evidence to determine whether a patient was brain dead. The problem is, clinical understaffing is all too common. In order to make up for problems such as lack of manpower and inconvenience, the internationally accepted practice is to set a standard for judging brain death. There is no need for specialists, only clinicians, who can be competent after passing a qualification examination after short-term training.
At this point, some people may doubt whether non-neurologists can judge brain death.
There is no need to be nervous about this issue. In fact, determining brain death is a process, just like determining cardiac death patients is a process. Among the criteria for judging brain death, there is a rule: the cause of the patient's disease must be clear, and it must be clear that irreversible brain damage leads to brain death.
This level requires the in-depth participation of neurosurgeons and cannot be ruled out.
Having said this, you can understand why Cao Yong insisted on sending his child to a specialized hospital like Fangze. Obviously, we want to prevent omissions from happening in all aspects. With the research and judgment of the most professional team of neurologists, we can try our best to avoid misdiagnosis of the child's condition due to medical imprecision.
This answered part of Cao Zhao¡¯s doubts, and at the same time, he heard an answer from his brother¡¯s words that he had thought about but didn¡¯t quite want: ¡°Do you think the child might have been brain-dead at that time?¡±
"I was at the scene. Apart from a flashlight and cotton swabs, what other tools did I have on hand?" Cao Yong felt amused.
Didn¡¯t he say that at the beginning? Making a medical diagnosis is a very, very rigorous matter. Although he is a doctor, he doesn't have clairvoyance, so he can't see through what kind of brain injury this child has.
"We need to do a CT scan, and do it more than once." Cao Yong reiterated the key points he had said.
Don¡¯t take their brother-in-law¡¯s revelation on the phone that the CT scan initially showed that the child had injured his brain stem as the final result.