Reflections on Brain Death, Hope, and the Limits of Certainty (opens in new tab)

by at The case of a young child at Texas Children's Hospital following a near-drowning incident has reignited a debate that medicine has struggled with for more than half a century. According to multiple media reports, the family sought judicial intervention to obtain additional time, explore transfer options, and investigate alternative therapeutic approaches before any final determination regarding brain death would foreclose those possibilities.[1,2] As so often happens in the modern Unite...