Out of curiosity, if Soylent really does provide every nutrient the body requires, would that mean a user would no longer have to defecate?
My reasoning is if every nutrient is absorbed and used, there is no physical waste left, and all toxins and byproducts would be expelled through urine.
Having done pure liquid diets (with significantly reduced caloric loads) on numerous occasions (not by choice, unlike these fellows) this is mostly true. One will typically see bowel movement frequency drop dramatically, although not entirely to zero in my case.
That said, I am missing a significant length of digestive tract, so my experience may be atypical. I would also note that that as calories increase, to or above your metabolic needs, that this effect would likely diminish.
Since I'm pretty un-connected to this account, going to start undergraduate at Cornell. While it may not be Harvard/Yale/Princeton, I'm not going to complain (however there is still some element of jealousy/annoyance).
What is HN's opinion of Cornell, especially vs other Ivies?
This has to be one of the most intellectually backwards arguments I have ever heard. It is almost on par with arguments presented by christian fundamentalists.
Being brain-dead is essentially being dead. Hospitals and surgeons will not operate on you unless you are not expected to recover, or regain consciousness. Being brain-dead, it is also very unlikely that you feel pain. Reflexes can easily still be active even with brain-death, leading to convulsions during surgery. If the author had ever seen a serious car-accident victim in a coma, he wouldn't have second thoughts about organ donation. In his blog post, he is insinuating that you are still a normal, living, conscious human being. You aren't.
Having grown up in a family of medical doctors, I find this blog post appalling.
EDIT: As thebigshane pointed out, my wording is indeed terrible, I wrote my response in a hurry, and I will not edit it to avoid confusion. I do not have any professional medical education, all I know in this field is derived from in-depth conversations and discussions with my parents, whom are both medical doctors. Brain death is indeed classified by the Harvard criteria, but these also include the patient being non-responsive to external stimuli, such as pain (which contradicts the blog post's claim of convulsions during surgery due to the lack of anesthesia).
While I agree with you overall, I have to nitpick your wording...
Being brain-dead, it is also very unlikely that you feel pain
Very unlikely? This seems like something that should demand complete[0] confidence.
[0]: Ok, ok, maybe not 100% provability, but I want to know more about this surely subjective determination by the doctors. Or is there an automated reading from some machine that can objectively say "Patient is 95% likely to not feel you operating on him alive"?
(Also, this is "deeply interesting" according to HN standards but lots of potential for irrational discourse -- my comment probably included)
If you are brain dead you cannot feel pain because your brain is not there to receive the signals.
In computer speak, imagine you had a sensor that had external power and continued transmitting input to the CPU- the signals keep coming in, but the CPU is switched off. No processing of pain, no sensation of pain.
End of story
If I'm brain dead and there is zero chance of me feeling pain, they can take my organs. I just want them to be sure I'm brain dead. How is that determined?
(oh and my brain is not an electrical cpu, I understand your analogy but I'm not sure it applies given the complexity of a human brain, for example certain parts of a brain can be "off" while the others are "on")
When your brain is 'working' it gives off signals, these are measured by an electroencephalograph (EEG). When those signals stop, you know the brain isn't functioning.
not even a serious car crash, even someone who has had a major heart attack. talking from personal experience, they can look just fine, but if their brain was without oxygen long enough, there's no chance that brain's coming back, even though certain reactions will still be present.
>Hospitals and surgeons will not operate on you unless you are not expected to recover, or regain consciousness.
Except when they can cut corners, because "ok, the guy is badly injured, there's some other patient that needs that organ", etc. It's not like they are gonna be extra thorough each time. Humans are known to do that...
It's my impression that Doctors are generally very conservative about this, for 2 major reasons:
- they take the Hippocratic oath very seriously. It's a big part of the culture and indoctrination of medical students.
- they've seen enough examples of people dying from seemingly minor conditions and others of people recovering from seemingly irrecoverable situations to know that their predictive powers are quite fallible
So sure, I expect Doctors to cut corners and make mistakes, after all, they are human. But this is one area where I expect that they're much more likely to err by not declaring death soon enough...
The people who would be cutting the corners see the people whose lives they're giving up on, but they never meet the people who would be using their organs. Doctors and nurses still make mistakes and get lazy, but I don't think it has anything to do with organ donation.
My reasoning is if every nutrient is absorbed and used, there is no physical waste left, and all toxins and byproducts would be expelled through urine.