Brain Dead on Ventilator: Can Hair & Nails Grow?

An internal medicine doctor answers the question of hair and nail growth in a legally dead (brain) body.

A person who has been declared brain dead, but is “breathing” due to a ventilator, and being fed via a feeding device, is considered legally dead, despite the beating heart.

So if the person is dead (despite warm skin and mechanical respiration), a fair question is: Does the hair and skin continue growing?

After all, the ventilator is pumping in air, and the beating heart is circulating this oxygen, and doesn’t oxygen (plus nourishment from the feeding device) make cells multiply?

Skin and hair continue to grow for some time after a deceased person is buried underground.

But what if a deceased (brain dead) individual is kept long-term even indefinitely, on a ventilator? Can their hair grow waist length, nails grow super long?

“Life exists in our body at many levels,” begins Jacob Teitelbaum, MD, medical director of the Fibromyalgia and Fatigue Centers nationally, and author of “The Fatigue and Fibromyalgia Solution.”

“If one suggests that this means that death is not present, and all measures possible should be taken to continue cell death, then all of us will continue to be tortured to death over centuries, while our cells are cultured out on massive Petri dishes.”

Cells

“Put differently, at any funeral living cells continue in the body,” continues Dr. Teitelbaum. That does not mean that we call 9-1-1 and have the rescue squad come out and do CPR.

“In addition, the 10 trillion bacterial cells in our colon that make up part of our bodies (comprising as many cells as there are in the entire rest of our body) can continue to live on even months after a person is buried, so if the presence of any living cells means that CPR and all possible life support needs to be continued, we need to be digging up a lot of buried bodies.”

With all that said, just because the hair and nails continue to grow in a brain dead person on a ventilator, this does not mean that person is alive in the legal sense.

The hair and skin can grow for as long as they’re on a ventilator, but that person—as a person, as a whole—is no longer alive.

Dr. Teitelbaum is a board certified internist and nationally known expert in the fields of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, sleep and pain.

Lorra Garrick has been covering medical, fitness and cybersecurity topics for many years, having written thousands of articles for print magazines and websites, including as a ghostwriter. She’s also a former ACE-certified personal trainer.