title: Cause of death--so-called designed event acclimaxing timed happenings.
abstract: Cause-of-death as an established global medical institution faces its greatest challenge in the commonplace observation that the healthy do not necessarily survive and the diseased do not necessarily die. A logical analysis of the assumed relationships between disease and death provides some insights that allow questioning the taken-for-granted relationship between defined disease/s and the final common parameter of death. Causalism as a paradigm has taken leave of all advanced sciences. In medicine, it is lingering on for anthropocentric reasons. Natural death does not come to pass because of some (replaceable) missing element, but because the evolution of the individual from womb to tomb has arrived at its final destination. To accept death as a physiologic event is to advance thanatology and to disburden medical colleges and hospitals of a lot of avoidable thinking and doing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anatomy, Seth G. S. Medical College and K. E. M. Hospital, Parel, Mumbai - 400 012, India.
authors.forename: M L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Kothari
authors.forename: L A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Mehta
authors.forename: V M
authors.initials: VM
authors.lastname: Kothari
mesh_terms: D001293:Attitude to Death; D001926:Brain Death; D015984:Causality; D002423:Cause of Death; D005065:Euthanasia; D006801:Humans; D010686:Philosophy, Medical