Question

1. How to diagnose “brain death”? Please mention the situation of brain death in India and the law associated with it.

2. Please analyze the cause of death of the following case:

A middle aged man suffered by knife cuts with superficial lacerations on the both shouldering, hemorrhage of arms and legs, with fatty embolism and Coronary heart disease, give the cause of death and the evidence of your conclusion.

Answer 1

Answer 1:

Brain death is a condition where the brain completely stops to function. Any serious trauma to brain or loss of blood supply to brain leads to brain death. To diagnose brain death both the eyes are exposed to torch light to see whether they are responding to light or not, the eyes are stroked with tissue to see whether they are reacting or not, ice cold water is added to both the ear to see that eyes are moving or not, pinching of nose is done and forehead is pressurised to observe any response, a plastic tube is made to enter the wind pipe to see if there is any coughing or not, ventilator is disconnected to see if ventilation occurs naturally or not, if the patient fails to respond to all the above tests then he is declared brain dead. In India there is lack of clarity in medical professionals for the steps to be taken when a person is brain dead and when patient's relatives have not given consent for organ donations. Patient's relatives think that the patient is declared brain dead for the sake of organ donation as they don't trust the Indian healthcare system. Even to withdraw ventilator from brain dead persons the consent is required from patient's relatives because of belief of miraculous recovery of patient which the relatives have. In India there are three different laws for death:

1) The Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969 (RBDA)

2) The Indian Penal Code, 1862 (IPC) (Section 46) and

3) The Transplantation of Human Organs Act of 1994 (THOA).

In India there is absence of universal acceptance of brain death as out of the above three laws only THOA mentions brain death in its definition of death.