It is now considered by the medical profession and supported by legal and some ethical consensus that if a person's entire brain is dead, the person is dead. The reason is that if the entire brain is destroyed, there is absence of spontaneous breathing and an expected cessation of heartbeat. It is on the basis of this concept that all life support treatments which the patient may have had in place before brain death has …showed first 75 words of 1489 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1489 total…day they were pronounced brain dead and it is hard to let go of a person. The main problem is that we have opened the door to technology and it has become impossible to determine now when death occurs. It occurs now when our abilities to keep dead people alive through machines fails or fails to bring them back from the dead. But our technological expertise will only increase, and push that limit ever farther.