Catholic Ping
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Posted on 02/04/2010 9:55:48 AM PST by NYer
LONDON (Reuters) - A man in a deeply unconscious state for five years has been able to communicate with doctors using just his thoughts in a study scientists say is a "game changer" for care of vegetative state patients.
British and Belgian researchers used a brain scanner called functional magnetic resonance imaging to show the man, who suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in a road accident in 2003, was able to think "yes" or "no" answers to questions by wilfully changing his brain activity.
Experts say the result means all patients in coma-like states should be reassessed and it may change the way they are cared for in future.
After detecting signs of awareness, the doctors scanned the man's brain while he was asked to say "yes" or "no" to questions such as "is your father's name Thomas?." The results showed that by changing his brain activity, the man communicated his answer.
"We were astonished when we saw the results of the patient's scan and that he was able to correctly answer the questions that were asked by simply changing his thoughts," said Adrian Owen, co-author of the study from the Medical Research Council.
"Not only did these scans tell us that the patient was not in a vegetative state but, more importantly, for the first time in five years it provided the patient with a way of communicating his thoughts to the outside world."
The man, now 29 years old, was one of 23 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state who were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The scans detected signs of awareness in four of the patients, the researchers wrote in their study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Catholic Ping
Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
I will always wonder ... could Terry S. have communicated in some way like this? I am so ashamed that our country did such an unspeakable thing. It still brings tears to my eyes.
Why is he still alive? I guess the abortion and euthenasia ghouls missed one! / s
Not that Geer or Felos would care.
Imagine being locked in a completely non-functioning body.
According to the article ...
A bitter right-to-die row erupted in the United States in 2005 over the fate of Terri Schiavo, a 41-year-old woman who had been in a vegetative state since a heart attack in 1990.Schiavo's case went back and forth through the U.S. courts and even prompted then President George W. Bush to intervene as her husband fought for doctors to halt feeding and let her die.
Experts say traumatic brain injury can heal better than injury from stroke or heart attack, such as Schiavo suffered.
So, in answer to your question, no, this technology would not have been beneficial. On the other hand, no one has the right to deny a human being their right to life.
"Is your father's name Thomas?"
THanks for the clarification.
I still feel terrible about her.
wow
now, if we can adapt that to interrogate criminals and terrorists....
There is possibly one thing worse ...
Living in an iron lung.
She was not in a vegetative state. She was alert and responsive but mentally handicapped.
I hate this phrase, "let her die". If I refuse to feed my 4 year old daughter until she starved to death nobody would say I "let her die". They'd say I murdered her. And rightly so. She needs the food to live, she cannot get food on her own, I have the food, it is in my capacity to give it to her and I have a moral obligation to provide it. Just because she can't go and get the food herself doesn't make it okay to deny it to her.
How is Terry Schaivo different? Well, we're told she in a persistent vegetative state, that her brain was basically dead already. Yet some say she was responsive to various stimuli so there was some question, and here we see that doctors dont know everthing about the brain after all. And while her husband wanted her dead, her parents were prepared to accept the burden (and the hope!) of caring for her and keeping her alive.
I don't really think this was an issue for the federal government to decide but I do think that from a moral perspective a great wrong was done.
Yes, we could have tried it on Terry S.,except SHE WAS CONCIOUS!
Now I despise the Left even more so. Didn’t think it was possible.
This will never matter to the left wing relativists. They will still always believe that THEY have the right to decide the quality of other’s lives.
Amen. Have you seen the video of her responding to her mother. She was not in a coma but fully alert. That is what I thought as well. She was murdered by dehydration. When we are talking about life sustaining MEDICAL treatment that should mean life support (vents etc) not food and water. We would all die without food and water no matter how healthy we were. The other thing that bothers me greatly is that they made it sound like it was such a peaceful death for Terry. There is nothing peaceful about it. Kate Adamson was in a locked in state and denied food and water for 8 days. She showed signs of recovery and they restored her food and water. Here is her testimony to this “peaceful” death. “O’Reilly: When they took the feeding tube out, what went through your mind?
Adamson: When the feeding tube was turned off for eight days, I thought I was going insane. I was screaming out in my mind, “Don’t you know I need to eat?” And even up until that point, I had been having a bagful of Ensure as my nourishment that was going through the feeding tube. At that point, it sounded pretty good. I just wanted something. The fact that I had nothing, the hunger pains overrode every thought I had.
O’Reilly: So you were feeling pain when they removed your tube?
Adamson: Yes. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. To say that — especially when Michael [Schiavo] on national TV mentioned last week that it’s a pretty painless thing to have the feeding tube removed — it is the exact opposite. It was sheer torture, Bill.
O’Reilly: It’s just amazing.
Adamson: Sheer torture . . .
In preparation for this article, I contacted Adamson for more details about the torture she experienced while being dehydrated. She told me about having been operated upon (to have her feeding tube inserted in her abdomen) with inadequate anesthesia when doctors believed she was unconscious. Unbelievably, she described being deprived of food and water as “far worse” than experiencing the pain of abdominal surgery, telling me:
The agony of going without food was a constant pain that lasted not several hours like my operation did, but several days. You have to endure the physical pain and on top of that you have to endure the emotional pain. Your whole body cries out, “Feed me. I am alive and a person, don’t let me die, for God’s Sake! Somebody feed me.”
But what about the thirst, I asked:
I craved anything to drink. Anything. I obsessively visualized drinking from a huge bottle of orange Gatorade. And I hate orange Gatorade. I did receive lemon flavored mouth swabs to alleviate dryness but they did nothing to slack my desperate thirst.”
Exactly. Why is it that on this forum people have bought into this lie that she was vegatative and brain dead or whatever they want to say to make her sound less than human?
This would be horrible as well but at least this man can communicate with others, read, watch tv etc etc etc. I couldn’t imagine being able to hear the world but not participate in it.
Thanks for your comment on Terry Schiavo.
Although I'm a quiet libertarian on most moral issues, Terry's court ordered execution still makes me cringe with disbelief.
The woman literally died of thirst over a two week period.
If you treated a farm animal or a family pet that way, you'd be in jail.
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