Breathing in water sounds like a very painful way to die, as anybody who has accidentally swallowed wrong knows; even inhaling just a drop is very uncomfortable (if a lungful of water isn’t as painful, I’d say shock is the reason, as is the case with many serious injuries; perhaps also water that is osmotically and pH balanced in your lungs doesn’t hurt, as with water in your eyes).
I’m pretty sure cardiac arrest would top the list (the so-called “dropped dead from a massive heart attack” mentioned earlier), assuming it was due to an electrical disturbance and not a heart attack (myocardial infarction), probably also one of the fastest ways to die.
While not natural, a nuclear bomb detonating next to you would no doubt be painless as well as the fastest way to go (and the fastest way to decompose your body).
Nope. Next time you rapidly finish a 2-liter bottle of carbonated soda:
-exhale deeply
-wrap your lips around the bottle top
-inhale the gas in the bottle (use your hands to help collapse the bottle as you inhale).
You will instantly feel like you’ve been holding your breath for a very long time, and you will be desperate to exhale and suck in some fresh air.
And if you’re stupid enough to put a piece of dry ice in a zip lock bag and then inhale the extremely concentrated CO2 gas that fills the bag, you’ll find that it hurts really, really bad. DAMHIK.
I’m figuring what the OP means is least painful death by natural causes (but correct me if I’m wrong, OP). I’ve included a link to the commonly accepted definition since, as evidenced in this thread, dopers tend to overthink and overanalyze that sort of thing.
Getting a lungful of water is actually not painful at all. Several years ago, I was snorkeling for the first time and decided to turn over and float on my back. I kind of forgot about the part where the end of the snorkel was now underwater. I had just finished exhaling a large breath, so I sucked in enough seawater to fill my lungs.
I didn’t choke or cough. It just felt like I’d taken a deep breath of air that happened to be 20 degrees cooler than the last breath. I realized what I’d done and immediately jack-knifed out of the water, pulled the snorkel out of my mouth and expelled as much water as I could before I started coughing.
The coughing only starts when you’ve got both air and water in your lungs. I managed to start breathing again pretty quickly, but I spent the remainder of the evening coughing. Seawater is significantly more salty than plasma, so I kept having to clear my lungs even after the vast majority of the seawater was out, because what remained pulled plasma into my lungs to balance the osmotic pressure.
As for the least painful natural (by disease) death, my mom has told me many times that pneumonia was often called The Old Man’s Friend, because it allowed a fairly quick (hours or a couple of days compared to weeks and months) and fairly painless (compared to cancer, heart disease, or infection) death. She’s an RN, and she’s seen it enough times that I credit her opinion.
we haven’t taken a breath for a while (exhaled or inhaled)
If you doubt the potency of #3 above, try this: hold your breath until you think you can’t possibly hold it any longer. Then, breathe out a bit. You will be fine for a little while longer. Repeat. This can go on for a good while. Eventually, though, your carbon dioxide climbs so high you must breathe regardless.
Obviously, when you’re holding your breath, the relief you experience by exhaling a but can’t be due to your oxygen and carbon dioxide changing significantly (time course is too quick and there’s no way that a partial exhalation could have affected either level in any case). So, what’s going on?
We are hard-wired to feel the need to breathe when our lungs haven’t been stretched and/or relaxed ‘recently’ (i.e. there’s been no inhale and exhale, respectively). The signal to breathe when you haven’t exhaled or inhaled for a while is sent to the brain by what are termed “J receptors” (also called stretch receptors) in the lungs. They are responsible for the sense of breathlessness associated with many disease states.
BTW, when you enter a room filled with say, nitrogen, you do pass out from lack of oxygen. But, the lack of oxygen is so complete and so rapid that you don’t remain awake long enough to feel short of breath.
For those applying to med school, other things that stimulate the urge to breathe include:
acid build-up in the blood
severe bacterial infection
severe anemia (making you effectively without enough oxygen)
certain medications
lesions in what’s called the midbrain
(and more . . .)
I could imagine a seizure being pretty pain free. Remember that there are ALL kinds of seizures, other than the grand-mal epileptic seizures stereotyped on TV. Some seizures just appear as a hesitation in the person’s demeanor. Others just appear as if the person has passed out. I passed out once and the doctors never determined if it was vaso-vagal syncope or a seizure. One second I was there, then I felt about 1 second of dizziness, and I was out. I woke up about 5 seconds later laying on the floor. If I hadn’t woken up, that would have been a very pain-free way to die.
Any heart rhythm disturbance that suddenly causes your blood pressure to fall to zero (ventricular tachycardia without a pulse, ventricular fibrillation, asystole) would be pretty painless. Here one moment, gone the next.
Isn’t pneumonia the proximate cause of death for a lot of people who had other, more serious, problems before that? That is, the other problems weakened their systems so much that when they got pneumonia (possibly even caught at the hospital) it was that that killed them.
I believe this is what happened to my father. He had been weakening for several months, having been diagnosed with some kind of fibrillation or what one nurse called a “big, floppy old heart”. He ended up in the hospital, but what killed him a few days later was pneumonia, according to the death certificate.
Roddy
I came in to mention the “old man’s friend”. I’ve always wondered if that might just be something medical types said to assure family that their loved one didn’t suffer since pneumonia is often the immediate cause of natural death.
Well, I’ve seen enough folks die of pneumonia to think while it ain’t horrible, it ain’t great either. All depends on the level of awareness. Too much awareness and drowning in your own secretions just isn’t all that.
Well, me too, especially in my sleep. But it’s worth noting that in the old man’s friend days they didn’t prolong the event with bronchodilators, steroids, supplemental oxygen and antibiotics, plus they were probably comparing it to some nasty events that we don’t worry about so much anymore.