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gwern comments on Alzheimer's vs Cryonics - Less Wrong
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Were I to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I would purchase some hemlock. At that point, you might as well try to be frozen.
The thing is, suicide victims are always autopsied in the US (I saw that you attended the Houston meetup, so I'm going to assume you live in the States), which means you won't get frozen quickly enough (if at all). I suppose you could fake your suicide with something more subtle than poison, but now we're getting into questionable legal and ethical territory.
I thought they were only autopsied if they did not take the option of slowly starving themselves to death under medical supervision?
I've never heard of that before--do you know if doing that is actually legal?
Actually, though, my previous comment is wrong--there is no federal law mandating that all suicides be autopsied. I was misremembering what was stated in this book. Looking at it again, it actually says that suicides are almost always autopsied, but not 100% of the time. A quick Google search of some state legal codes seems to indicate that the autopsy requirement is actually determined at the state level, not at the federal level.
Such was my understanding from previous discussions.
Hmm. It's possible, given that the handful suicide cases I've found where autopsies weren't performed were cases in which the cause of death and intent to commit suicide were so blindingly obvious that an autopsy would just be a waste. (And, in many of them, a family remember requested that an autopsy not be performed.)
The bottom line is, I don't know much about the relevant laws or how medical supervision affects things. To get a definitive answer, you'd probably need to contact a cryonics provider, a doctor, or a lawyer.