This instruction can be generalized: don't lock any of your joints in extension against the car. A huge amount of suffering occurs from locking the leg in extension against the brake pedal. The dashboard will destroy the knee. Actually, locking your joints against any load is never a good idea.

You've been modded to +5, so at least a few other people share your belief that there are other tests that are in some way better. This reflects a typical belief on Slashdot, that the people who spent time creating a solution somehow didn't think of what took you all of five minutes. Brain death is not a subjective determination about one's quality of life after brain injury. It's meant to determine whether or not it's just the machine's that are keeping you alive, without actually killing you.

Recall that the brain may divided into the cerebrum, or "monkey brain," where all of the higher functions that make us human live; and the medulla, or "lizard brain," where all of the lower functions that keep us alive live. By the time we're talking about brain death determination, the monkey brain is gone. This is an unresponsive patient, off all sedating meds for several days, whose EEG shows at best sporadic activity (EEG will only truly flatline once the heart stops providing blood flow). You should have had an EEG before you ever get to this point.

The "wet willy" test is meant to excite the oculogyric reflex, where cold water gets the fluid in your semicircular canals convecting just a bit. The reflex makes your eyes move as part of the (lizard-brain mediated) attempt to remain standing in what is perceived as a loss of balance. The "shut off your air" part is to see if you retain the deepest held mammalian reflex, the drive to breathe, which is biochemically mediated by retained carbon dioxide.. Neither of these has anything to do with the cerebrum. If you can't do these things, you really are dead.

The fact that someone somewhere fucked up and nearly killed someone isn't really news. Nor does it really bear on the subject of whether or not "brain dead is really dead." The alternative is to waste away, unresponsive, on a ventilator, until you die of overwhelming infection. You have to set the standard somewhere.

But for some reason all the noise is made about embryonic research. I really do not understand why

I'll take a shot at this.

The existing treatments utilizing adult stem cells are all for treatment of blood borne cancers (ie, leukemia). The treatment consists of harvesting (patient or someone else's) bone marrow, processing it in some way, and freezing it for later infusion. You then give the patient a most excellent collection of poisons which destroy the existing bone marrow. You then reinfuse the frozen bone marrow (stem) cells to (hopefully) repopulate the patient's bone marrow. The difference between "bone marrow transplant" and "stem cell transplant" lies only in the processing. When this works it is resurrection. When it doesn't it is a fate worse than death.

The promise of NEW stem cell therapy is that you could harvest that same bone marrow (or fat cell, or whatever), process it, and use it to treat some completely unrelated-to-blood disease (like heart disease or spinal cord injury). This idea is that because embryonic stem cells are earlier in the stem cell lineage, they can differentiate into more cell types and are hence in come way "better". Multiple reports have shown (and been reported here) that you can take most any stem cell and turn it into any other cell type, so there is no real benefit to using stem cells of embryonic lineage.

For what it's worth, at least some "religious freaks" are perfectly capable of differentiating between stem cells of embryonic origin versus autologous stem cells. I have a number of colleagues who have (successfully) lobbied for funding from some of these same people to support their own stem cell work (adult autologous only). The message "don't just stand against things, be in favor of a solution" has been very, very powerful for people who do not consider themselves to be either hypocrites or freaks.

Modern medicine has no sense of humor. There is a form of colitis caused by Clostridium difficile which results from destruction of the normal colonic flora by antibiotic use. It frequently recurs and can be lethal. There is currently on ongoing clinical trial evaluating the use of stool transplantation to prevent recurrence of this infection.

While TFS is indeed inflammatory, your post is factually incorrect. Specifically, gram negative bacteria are very much more virulent than gram positive bacteria (or, for that matter, organisms that don't gram stain at all). The gram negatives are the only class of bacteria that express lipopolysaccharide endotoxin. The human immune system has specific receptors (like CD14) for this toxin, resulting in an extreme inflammatory response which is the pre-death phenomenon called 'sepsis'.

We saw these pathogens emerge in our ICU three years ago and have been using colistin. The side effects are real but not nearly as common with modern supportive care as they were 40 years ago. Which is good, because when the colistin quits working, well, your patient is dead. Currently these pathogens only emerge after many weeks of critical illness and multiple runs of strong intravenous antibiotics.

We go through fairly draconian measures to limit any spread of these organisms, which so far seem to work. Negative pressure rooms, isolation gowns and masks for simply entering the room, disposable stethoscopes, etc. all help. Rooms and gear are disinfected by two different individuals so that personal tendencies don't allow transmission. And we wash our hands. A lot.

Your statement is true for pure water instilled directly into the bloodstream, but not for ingested water. The human digestive system is a polymer (poly-phospholipid) lined tube that is impervious to water absorption. Water and ions have separate transport mechanisms that allow them to be absorbed in specific parts of the intestines. If you drink a sufficient amount of any fluid which is not a balanced salt solution, you will eventually throw yourself into an electrolyte imbalance state.

The fluid which eventually reaches the gut bacteria has a ton of secretions in it, from the salivary glands all the way down to the liver and pancreas, and bears no resemblance to the originally swallowed fluid. As such makes no physiological sense that drinking pure water is toxic to the beneficial gut bacteria (any more so than drinking whiskey).

Maybe. The lack of ethical standards certainly is hindering Chinese researchers from publishing in medical journals. The lack of an institutional review board for human research, or its equivalent for animals, is grounds to reject a manuscript out of hand for most reputable journals. It is disturbing, the number of manuscripts from Chinese researchers I personally have reviewed with sentences like "we administered repeated electrical shocks to the dog until its hindlimb fractured."

It's not quite that simple. The CT scanner is set up with a distinct scanning protocol for whatever part of the body you're imaging. If you're trying to get a detailed image of the bones of the pelvis you have to use more power than if you're imaging the lungs. The scan is further individualized by patient size. Given that infants and very large people are imaged on the same scanner, the software has to vary radiation dose over a reasonably wide range, and it's a different setting for every scan.

The spleen is composed of blood and a thin filigree of tissue that separates this blood from the main circulation. The WBCs are about the only interesting thing on a tissue slice of spleen. I agree with everything you say in the second paragraph. They use flow because it's super sensitive and high throughput- the guy in our lab can sort/count 15 different antigens from a 100 microliter sample. If this discovery turns out to be useful they would tie their antibody to a fluorophore so that a blood analyzer could see it.