People are waiting for human heart transplants and dying from the wait. I don't think there will be a shortage of patients who we can ethically treat whilst researching this new technique. It certainly isn't binary with a hard "sensitive line".
Does it? I'm definitely not a doctor, but it seems like a very difficult question to answer.
Even with perfect information, it seems unlikely there is always a simple/single answer. I would naively expect things like (and I'm making a bit up here, because I'm really not a doctor) "not enough oxygen reached his cells, because his lungs were bad at refreshing the air in them, his heart was bad at pumping blood in circles, his veins and arteries were in bad shape due to diet, and he wasn't moving around much because he had a cold further reducing circulation".
But also, we don't have perfect information. We have this set of measurements we could make without harming the patient, or consuming too much time on really expensive equipment like MRIs. Many of those measurements are no doubt themselves subject to some degree of interpretation error and confounding factors.
Maybe I underestimate our doctors, or overestimate the problem, but it doesn't sound easy to me.
"How often do autopsies turn up a major misdiagnosis in the cause of death? I would have guessed this happened rarely, in 1 or 2 percent of cases at most. According to three studies done in 1998 and 1999, however, the figure is about 40 percent."
It's disturbing to learn how thin the evidence is for a lot of modern medical operations. For example, the recommendations for certain cancer screenings have actually been reduced in recent years after it was found they were causing net harm.
This is especially true for severe cases like this, people in the ICU, etc.
If someone is in the ICU for multi-system organ failure, gets an infection, and then dies of multi-system organ failure, did the infection kill them? Was it a contributory cause? The same sort of question arises as in this case.
Yes and no, I think.
Technically my dad died of asphyxia. His cancer had spread to his lungs, he'd gotten pneumonia and was in hospital on oxygen. The doctors were clear he wouldn't be going home in the months he potentially had left. So he asked to be disconnected from the oxygen and he died an hour later.
So did he really die of asphyxia? Was it pneumonia, or the cancer? Clearly they were contributing factors, but in the end it was his decision to stop the oxygen, so as such was it suicide?
To me it doesn't really matter. He's gone and I'm just glad he didn't have to hang on to the bitter end.
Does it? As far as I know, not only are they happy to admit that they can't do it, efforts to try have mostly ceased. We used to do autopsies.
https://www.todaysgeriatricmedicine.com/archive/SO17p26.shtm...
> In the United States it is estimated that the rate of major errors (eg, incorrect cause of death [CoD], incorrect manner of death) found on death certificates completed at academic institutions is approximately 33% to 40%. Internationally, this rate at some hospitals rises as high as 80%
> A wealth of literature is available highlighting the prevalence of death certificate inaccuracy seen at the national and international levels, as well as multiple studies that indicate lack of training as the root cause in the United States. Despite these noted errors, death certificate data continue to inform research pathways and drive medical practice.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/a-covid-death-the-bureaucracy...
> natural cause of death reports are known to have a 20 percent to 60 percent inaccuracy rate according to the peer-reviewed literature.
> The system isn’t built to allow for investigation. In fact, in the state where I worked, doctors are supposed to provide causes of death within 15 hours of the death
> 30 percent of doctors have reported being instructed by the coroner to put an inaccurate cause of death on purpose so the [coroner's] office won’t need to take the case.
> When I worked as a death certificate clerk, I occasionally would send death certificate worksheets to multiple doctors involved in a patient’s care if we had a rush to bury or cremate. In these situations we needed to cast a wider net to find a rapidly responding doctor to finish the record before final disposition. Many times each physician would report an entirely different cause of death.
Death certificates and cause-of-death attribution mainly exist to satisfy procedural requirements, not because they're supposed to be informative or helpful. Courts need to do cause-of-death attribution. It can't be done. So they solve their problem by the very simple method of pretending they can do it anyway. (Courts take this approach everywhere, not just in death certificates. Drug dogs, accounting errors, expert testimony...)