If they say a person is brain dead,does that mean they are dead?

Question

A friend of mine has a carvenous sinus thrombosis,and has been declared brain dead.But although she is on a ventilator her heart is beating by itself,she looks as if she is sleeping.How do they know she is dead?

Answer 1

Yes.

Answer 2

Brain dead means just that. There is NO hope that the person will ever regain consciousness or function again. The heart can function independently. The brainstem controls respiration, so in a brain dead patient they have to be ventilated.   The criteria are very rigid for establishing brain death. It is not a diagnosis given casually.  Several tests have to be done, and more than one expert agree that there is no brain function.  Sorry about your friend.  She is gone, but the body remains.  

Answer 3

Many brain dead persons recovered fully. Complete death can be confirmed only when the body starts decomposing.A straight line ECG  continuously for 24 hrs is legally accepted as proof of death.

Answer 4

Brain activity is measured by an electroencephalograph (EEG). A heart can pump without the brain, but the person is gone if they are brain dead.

Answer 5

Their body is still alive, but they are long gone.

Answer 6

Being "brain dead" does not mean you are "dead". It means that there is no cognitive functioning going on, and that there is no chance of recovery from this state. The vital organs may still function, but when one is brain dead it becomes a choice that the next of kin needs to make whether they want to keep their loved one "living" in a vegetative state or unplug them from the machinery that keeps their body alive.

Answer 7

Medically, there are arguments about exactly what constitutes brain death.  Which is why the tests for brain death are so stict and exacting.  A previous answer addressed this and I have no dispute with the answer as given.  But there are other ways of looking at it.

Philosophically, the brain is the seat of knowledge and experience.  A person's knowledge and experience are what defines the person's life.  If the person's seat of knowledge and experience is dead, the person is dead whether or not the body is dead.  I.e. the person(ality) has ceased to exist.

Spiritually, we don't know.  We cannot measure the soul so cannot tell when it has left the body.  Nor do we know exactly when it enters the body except through religious readings.  If only there was consistency in the religious writings of various cultures...

I watched my mother go through fourth-stage Alzheimer's Disease.  She wasn't brain-dead because there was some response to various stimuli.  But she was as close to it as possible without being there.  It is not a pretty sight because you see the apparently healty body with nothing left of the personality that made it the person you knew.  Looking at a brain-dead person is tougher when it is someone you love because it triggers a cognitive dissonance.  Your mind says one thing, your heart says another.  Which only hurts worse!