What is a medically induced coma? If they can put them to sleep, why can they not wake them up?
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Medically induced comas are different from actual comas. With induced comas the body is essentially in a form of hibernation. Body functions are slowed and the brain doesn’t have enough energy to do more than maintain it’self. We can wake someone up from a medically induced coma, we just have to stop giving them drugs and wait for the drugs to leave their system
In an actual coma the body is fine but the brain is stuck somehow. We don’t actually know why this happens but we think it has something to do with brain damage.
There’s an area deep within your brain called the reticular activating system. It’s basically a network of neurons near the more primitive parts of your brain that connect to more advanced parts of the brain responsible for complex functions like awareness and perception.
When one is placed in a medically-induced coma, medications or gases are used to pharmacologically disconnect these two regions. As a result, awareness and level of consciousness is inhibited to the point that a person is rendered unresponsive. Keep in mind that level of consciousness is a spectrum; it’s only once you get to the most decreased level of consciousness (usually assessed by the presence or absence of primitive reflexes and certain brain wave patterns on EEG) that one is considered in a coma. If you’re curious, look up a scoring system called the Glasgow Coma Score; it characterizes the spectrum of one’s level of consciousness in an objective fashion.
In a healthy, uninjured brain, level of consciousness will improve once the medication being used is removed and metabolized. However, irreversible and reversible brain injuries can also compromise ones level of consciousness to the point that removing the medication won’t do anything. These are the patients that just don’t “wake up” as you say and can be declared brain dead in the most severe cases
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