Friday, June 26, 2009

Please DON'T Call Cardiac Arrest A Cause of Death

Cardiac_Arrest_by_SuperKusoKaoWhat would you think if you come across a conversation like this:

A: Hey do you know why Mr. Rockefeller was rich?
B: Oh of course, he's rich because he had earned lots of money.
A: Ahh thanks for telling, that's helpful!
Sounds dumb, no?

Well, what about this conversation.
A: How did he die?
B: He died because his heart stopped.
Sounds dumb, no?

Now time for some pseudo-medical-jargon 101:

Cardiac - adjective - related to the heart.
Arrest - noun - Stopping.

YES when you read a paper that says "Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest", they are telling you "Michael Jackson died of the stopping of his heart".

And they irk my nerd-sanity big time. Too tired to write more right now, I will update this post tomorrow.

[Continued here]

2 comments:

solcroft said...

A flawed analogy IMHO. "Having lots of money" is the definition of "rich", so yes, it'd be dumb to answer the question of "why is he rich" with the definition of "rich". On the other hand, "cardiac arrest" is not the definition of "death". In fact, I believe there's no hard and fast definition for "death", because there's no hard and fast definition of "life". So answering the question "how did he die" with "cardiac arrest" sounds much less absurd to me than the "rich man" analogy you posed.

Waiting for your update tomorrow. :D

changyang1230 said...

Hi solcroft thanks for visiting my blog? May I know who you are if you don't mind? :)

Anyway I agree it's not the best analogy. I have changed the word "had a lot of money" to "earned a lot of money". In this case it would be a better analogy because someone can be rich by earning lots of money, inheriting money from a millionaire father, or robbing a bank, among many other ways. :D