Everyday Dying

Euthanasia is a very controversial issue. It is often described as compassionate killing, or an act of causing death for the benefit of a suffering person. The original Greek word, euthanos, means easy death. While human euthanasia is legal in some countries including Canada, Netherlands, Belgium and Colombia, in most other places it is considered illegal, although assisted suicide is more widely accepted. In the UK neither is legal. Although similar, there is a difference between the act of assisted suicide and euthanasia. Euthanasia involves action or deliberate lack of it, with the intention of causing death. For example, it might involve a lethal injection or withholding food from a terminally ill person who is unable to feed themselves. Meanwhile, assisted suicide involves providing an indirect means of death for the sufferer, as per their request, such as giving out too much prescription medication, which would allow for an overdose. While by definition the law of euthanasia ...

It is common for individuals and relatives of the deceased to donate dead bodies to science, believing they are contributing to good causes, such as disease research and potential organ donations. Most often there are no questions asked once the donations have been made. However, what should be known, and most often is not publicised, is the fact that donating a body to science is likely to contribute to commercial activities of the company the corpse had been donated to, more than to the interests of actual true science. The reality is that the body-donation industry has loose regulations, and profits often matter more than ensuring the cadavers are actually used for legitimate research. A case has been recently reported of an amateur who purchased human heads from body-donation companies, for several thousand dollars each. He stored the heads in a refrigerator for the purpose of conducting self-taught experiments on them, even though the organisations claimed to only be selling par...