Word: brained
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...program suggests that the brain-death criteria, particularly in Britain, are not strict enough and intimates that a factor may be the need for healthy organs for transplants. To buttress the show's argument, the producers described the experiences of five American patients who were thought dead but who survived. Only one was ever considered as a possible organ donor. Two were women who had taken drug overdoses, one was a premature infant, another was a man paralyzed by a muscle-relaxing agent. The most sensational case was that of a man who lost consciousness after suffering a heart...
Doctors in Britain, including Neurologist Bryan Jennett and Surgeon Robert Sells, who were interviewed on the program, are crying foul. In a barrage of letters to newspapers and medical journals, they claim, with some justice, that the show distorted facts. They point out that brain-death codes were set up not to ease transplants but to spare families draining bedside vigils. Says Jennett: "Only one in eight or nine patients taken off respirators ever becomes a donor...
...American patients, none could have been declared brain dead by the criteria set up in British or American codes. Doctors must first exclude certain conditions such as drug overdoses, which may mimic death but are reversible. Indeed, there is some confusion over the American cases cited. Neurologist Fred Plum of New York Hospital, who was interviewed for the program, stresses that the patient he discussed was never officially declared brain dead...
...which Panorama pushed, is also controversial. Doctors note that people who are alive can have a flat EEG, suggesting no brain activity. Moreover, even inanimate matter can appear to have life. A doctor once wired a plate of Jell-O in an intensive care unit and proved it was "alive"; the electrodes picked up impulses from equipment in the room. Says Plum: "EEGS are done more as a reassuring step to doctor and family than because they are any more foolproof than good clinical observation...
...wife Constanze warmly and fetchingly. Nicholas Kepros must also be singled out for the feline subtlety of his portrayal of Emperor Joseph II, brother of Marie Antoinette. Here are the mean, mangling whims of absolute power expressed by a man with a tongue of silk and a tone-deaf brain. In some ways, he is Peter Shaffer's most exquisitely precise creation of the evening...