My mom was, most likely, poisoned. Lots of details, but I'm not going there. An autopsy, immediately after her death, would have cleared things up, I believe, but that's all in the distant past, now.
My mother always believed that her step-mother poisoned her father. Of course that was back in the old days when it was much easier to get away with murder.
Yeh, most deaths here escape autopsies because of the attending physician's diagnosis, even in a Home Care scenario.
The autopopsies I mentioned (about sids/ crib death) proved foul play. (by the medical system). They did not rule it out. Thus, not popular. Not discussed. Not published. (biggest cover ups are medical)
Really? Maybe for individuals.... If someone has enough money, it is very easy. It was published many or a few years ago - (maybe a movie? too) "How to legally get away with it" ---- build/open a hospital. Easy peasy.
For about 50 years at least, that seems to be the pattern - bury the mistakes, cover them up. When a contract to do autopsies on all the babies who died of sids after an immunization was permitted (decades ago), it was discovered that every one of the babies could have been still alive IF they had been given two bottles of water in the hours before they went to sleep/ died. THe blood in every one of them was so 'thick', it had caused heart failure. This only happened in those who had been given a dpt mmr or similar vaccine.
Autopsies are the ultimate Quality Assurance tool for medicine. Without autopsies, you learn nothing. Did the treatment work? Was the diagnosis correct? I don't know how it goes now, but when I worked in North Carolina, any death that was not being treated by a physician required an autopsy. I don't know if that is still true. Here in Alaska, hospital pathologists only do autopsies at the request of the family since insurance generally does not reimburse for them. The medical examiner in Anchorage does do quite a few, as there are lots of bodies found here in wilderness areas, and an autopsy is required for cause of death and corpse identity. Forensic autopsies and medical autopsies do differ however. They are generally not done as the article cited by @Lon Tanner stated because they can lead to malpractice lawsuits against both the physician or the hospital or both. I once read of a surgeon who was working on an AIDS patient clearing fungus from his lungs, when suddenly the patient bled out and died on the table. Not autopsy was required, but the surgeon insisted that it be done. A fistula was found between the lung that was being cleared and the pulmonary artery. When the fungus was cleared, the blood flooded the lung. No one had ever seen this phenomena before, and after this autopsy, the possibility of this occurring was checked prior to clearing fungus from the lungs of immunocompromised patients. This is just one example of what can be learned from autopsy. Foul play is another thing that may be missed, even with a medical autopsy, as hospital pathologists are trained to look for medical causes of death, but only the sharpest ones will check for foul play.
Who controls the autopsies overall ? Who controls if they get publishes/ public ? Who prevented the autopsies from being general knowledge, that proved beyond any doubt scientifically, medically, that crib death, sids, was caused by the immunizations produced by big pharma ? All questions that have been answered over the decades, since 1930 at least when doctors who knew would not trust the drug manufacturers nor their methods. Doctors who were blacklisted, silenced (censored, made outcasts professionally, even killed/died suddenly (like 200 microbiologists recently who exposed the trouble with the virul theory and the reasons behind it) ...
The problem with autopsies is that the Pathologist can be influenced by money and or fear. I doubt autopsies on every corpse would change anything. The person cannot be brought back to life and even in criminal cases, justice is seldom administered. I believe that in any suspicious death autopsies should be performed, but two independent pathologists should be involved and the operation all on video. In a world where justice was the rule, not the exception, I would say yes, autopsies on all deaths that have an element of suspicion.
What a great thread, looking at several sides of the question. I come to the conclusion that necessity lies in the eye of the beholder. It surely seems that for those with terminal illness, unless there is reason to suspect a hastening of death, that cause is obvious and autopsy unnecessary. But for sudden death of an apparently healthy person, an autopsy can yield important info for family members about their own previously unknown risks. And yet, new DNA reports can also highlight potential genetics-based health risks too, and are probably much cheaper than an autopsy. On the other hand, the issue of hospitals burying mistakes is real and probably all unexpected deaths there should be autopsied. I worked for a while for a basic sciences department at a medical school. One of the department's needs was to procure cadavers for advanced anatomy classes. I never heard those classes called autopsies, but that's what they were in a sense. I know some people arrange to leave their bodies to science so that docs in training can learn. There's no substitute for learning about the human body from the up close and personal, inside out investigation of it.
All very true, but many of the "Angels of Mercy" who kill sick, dying, and sometimes not-so-sick patients have been detected when an autopsy has been demanded by a doctor or family member. Succinyl choline seems to be the drug of choice since it is so difficult to detect and seldom even looked for in a sick patient. Amateurs tend to use rat poison of some kind, and, in a famous case of the Doctors Green, the wife doctor tried several times to kill her husband using ricin, since she thought no one would look for it in her sick husband. Fortunately, she failed twice and was caught on the third try. If she had succeeded on the first try, she never would have been caught, but the recurring illness in her otherwise healthy husband started them looking for foul play.
Such horrible circumstances those are, too @Don Alaska. And I don't have any objection to docs and families insisting on an autopsy. That's different, in my head, from autopsies being automatically required as a matter of bureaucracy. I want to say .... As a general principle I tend to object to anything being done -- if public health and safety aren't at issue -- just because some bureaucracy says it must be done, especially when no logical rationale is provided. But even as I type that out I'm sure there are other things that I'd favor bureaucracy imposing. I can be a mass of contradictions. LOL
I don't know that routine autopsies make sense but when there is any doubt as to whether a death was natural or not, it would make sense.