Major Causes: The Death Of A Child

In the United States, approximately 55,000 pediatric deaths occur annually, and 80% of children who die in hospitals do so in an intensive care unit and emergency department (Kongsuwan et al., 2016). Although advances in health care, thousands of children die annually from life threatening illnesses. Death can occur after a prolonged illness, such as respiratory failure, cancer, or suddenly and unexpectedly, such as after an injury or sudden infant death. Major causes of child deaths include immaturity-related conditions, including respiratory, cardiovascular disorders, congenital anomalies, and injuries (Stayer & Lockhart, 2016). The death of a child can be difficult for families to comprehend and accept. For parents, the death of a child …show more content…
Most patients, however, wonder almost immediately if they will recover enough to return home again. Patients feel like healthcare providers do not focus on their feeling about fear to the death. Most caregivers take time to talk to the patients, but focus mostly upon everyday things. In the acute phase of treatment, the critically ill person does not fight to retain or regain limited autonomy. The fall into serious or life-threatening illness cuts holes into the individual’s existential pattern (Almerud et al., 2007). For children, parents have played a vital role in their life. So, when children are facing with death and dying, it also affects the parents and others family members such as siblings or grandparents. There are two major philosophical perspectives that can address the death and dying in …show more content…
A body is viewed as mechanistic when it is viewed as working like a machine with different components or parts. The mechanistic body has no interaction with the world or environment surrounding it, therefore the mechanistic body is functioning independently. According to Marcum (2004), the human body is viewed as a material, mechanized objet that is reducible to a collection of physical parts. From this perspective, the patient’s body is “a machine composed of individual body parts, which can be fixed or even replaced with the new ones when broken or lost” (Marcum, 2004, p. 311). The mechanistic perspective has focused on medical knowledge, practice, and modern medical technology. Such focus has worked well in some areas to envision diagnosis of disease and treatment. The patient’s body as a machine is separated from the patient’s self and lived context. In addition, the mechanistic view has a profound impact on the relationship between patients and healthcare providers because healthcare providers focus only on the output of machines monitoring patients rather than the patients’ accounts of the illness experiences, emotions, and lived contexts of their lives (Leder, 1992; Marcum, 2004). Western medicine has adopted a Cartesian metaphysical framework that reduces self to a cognitive knower only tenuously related to a mechanical material body. Such a view of the