When they say “He/She has 3 days to live” how do they know?
In: Biology
All diseases have specific professions that take a certain amount of time. While there is some wiggle room due to different people reacting differently, you can generally expect about the same timeline for all patients.
Consider broken legs, for instance. The average broken leg takes 6-8 to heal. We know this because over the years we’ve observed that patient take more than 5 weeks and less than 9 to regrow the necessary bone to be considered healed.
Based off of previous cases.
Doctors can’t perfectly predict when you’ll die, but they can give you a good estimate based on how long all the people who had this disease previously took to die.
Obviously sometimes they’re wrong, either too long or too short, but it’s the best estimate they can give based on the stage of the illness you have and how all the people who had it before you faired.
It’s much more predictable when it is a disease like cancer, diabetes or Alzheimer’s wherein the body starts shutting down organs to try to survive. Cancer is remarkably predictable, and some hospice nurses can predict the time of death within an hour even 3 days ahead. There are signs like “the death rattle”, in which breathing becomes very labored when you only have a few hours left.
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