What does it mean when someone died of natural causes?

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asked Jan 17, 2022 in Other-Education by bettywhite (1,150 points)
What does it mean when someone died of natural causes?

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answered Jan 17, 2022 by QJesse44 (8,910 points)
When someone dies of natural causes it means that the person died due to health issues or just of organs naturally failing.

A natural cause death simply means that the person did not commit suicide or was not murdered or died in an accident etc.

When a person is old and dies it's usually marked as the person died of natural causes such as heart failure, stroke, etc.

When a death certificate says a person's death was “natural,” it is really ruling out the involvement of external causes.

The person did not take their own life and they were not killed by somebody else or in an accident such as a car crash or drug overdose.

A death by natural causes results from an illness or an internal malfunction of the body not directly caused by external forces, other than infectious disease.

For example, a person dying from complications from influenza and/or pneumonia (infections), cancer, a stroke, a heart attack (internal body malfunctions), or sudden heart failure would most likely be listed as having died from natural causes.

"Death by natural causes" is sometimes used as a euphemism for "dying of old age", which is considered problematic as a cause of death (as opposed to a specific age-related disease); there are also many non-age-related causes of "natural" death, for legal manner-of-death purposes.

An unnatural death results from an external cause, typically including homicides, suicides, accidents, medical errors, alcohol intoxications and drug overdoses.

Jurisdictions differ in how they categorize and report unnatural deaths, including level of detail and whether they are considered a single category with subcategories, or separate top-level categories.

There is no international standard on whether or how to classify a death as natural vs. unnatural.

"Mechanism of death" is sometimes used to refer to the proximate cause of death, which might differ from the cause that is used to classify the manner of death.

For example, the proximate cause or mechanism of death might be brain ischemia (lack of blood flow to the brain), caused by a malignant neoplasm (cancer), in turn caused by a dose of ionizing radiation administered by a person with intent to kill or injure, leading to certification of the manner of death as "homicide".

The manner of death can be recorded as "undetermined" if there is not enough evidence to reach a firm conclusion.

For example, the discovery of a partial human skeleton indicates a death, but might not provide enough evidence to determine a cause.

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