Depictions of ‘brain death’ in the media: medical and ethical implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Debates and controversies have shaped the understanding and the practices related to death determined by neurological criterion (DNC). Confusion about DNC in the public domain could undermine this notion. This confusion could further jeopardise confidence in rigorous death determination procedures, and raise questions about the integrity, sustainability, and legitimacy of modern organ donation practices. OBJECTIVE: We examined the depictions of 'brain death' in major American and Canadian print media to gain insights into possible common sources of confusion about DNC and the relationship between expert and lay views on this crucial concept. METHODS: We gathered 940 articles, available in electronic databases, published between 2005 and 2009 from high-circulation Canadian and American newspapers containing keywords 'brain dead' or 'brain death'. Articles were systematically examined for content (eg, definitions of brain death and criteria for determination of death) using the NVivo 8 software. RESULTS: Our results showed problematic aspects in American and Canadian media, with some salient differences. DNC was used colloquially in 39% (N=366) of the articles and its medical meaning infrequently defined (2.7%; N=14 in the USA and 3.6%; N=15 in Canada). The neurological criterion for determination of death was mentioned in less than 10% of the articles, and life support in about 20% of the articles. Organ donation issues related to DNC were raised more often in Canadian articles than in American articles (33.5% vs 21.2%; p<0.0001). INTERPRETATION: Further discussion is needed to develop innovative strategies to bridge media representations of DNC with experts' views in connection with organ donation practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".