| Nihilego |
December 9th, 2016 4:46 PM |
Death has so many causes way beyond cells malfunctioning and leading to an organism's death (which, by the way, is not always the endpoint in diseases which lead to death - many infectious diseases are exceptions), which I think is an important consideration.
Let's contrast death by cancer against, say, getting hit by a train. In this example, we can't really call the latter of these a disease; getting hit by a train and dying isn't a result of some biological malfunction. It's a result of being hit by a train. If we try and say that death itself is a disease which arises immediately upon being hit by a train then maybe you'll start to get somewhere, but issues show up pretty quickly. Some of those issues when considering these causes of death might be things like... what causes the disease? What are the symptoms of the disease? What are contributors to the diseases pathogenesis? Now that the person has the disease, what are they like and how are they functioning? Questions like these are virtually impossible to start answering when you compare deaths from different sources - I used an extreme example but it works in other ways, too. For example, a stroke victim and an AIDS sufferer will produce very different answers.
So, the only similarity that I could come up with between all of the deaths that I considered was that, well, the person was dead. But, there were no real connecting factors or similarities between the people when you try and look any further beyond that; it's simply that they're all dead. For this reason, if you're going to look at death as anything, I'd consider it more of a symptom than a disease - just like coughing, which can associate with anything from choking to tuberculosis. It's associated with many, many conditions and circumstances itself while simultaneously not carrying its own characteristic set of prerequisites or hallmarks other than the symptom i.e., the symptom of being dead. You could argue that death is a collection of biological phenomena and therefore constitutes more than a "symptom", but this is true of every commonly accepted symptom anyway - although I realise that in some cases, full-blown diseases such as cancer are symptoms of other diseases which does complicate this argument. It's probably also worth making the point that, when someone dies, "they died" is never an acceptable cause because death does not kill; it arises as the result of something else, just like a symptom.
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