Posted on 04/02/2005 6:41:28 PM PST by sruleoflaw
. . Oh? . .and who does the teaching? YOU?! You and who else? Felos? Greer? The "expert doctors" who say "nay" or the "expert doctors" who say "yea"?
Right, Paloma. Exactly. The plan here was to have Terri die a slow agonizing death before the eyes of the world, have it declared legal, and then the "peasants" will be clamoring for it to be done in a more humane and quicker way next time. "Hospice" will become a buzz word for the place where people can get rid of disabled and inconvenient family members real neat and tidy where they are taken over by this bunch.
Do I think the autopsy will be fair? Has anything that has happened so far in this case in that county been fair? I imagine that, too, will uphold the "unfortunate" decision to off Terri.
They must have the jolt cola IV version.
It is amazing how the national media is lazy, inane, monotone, and pathetically worthless. Actually, if anyone can be described as pvs I'd wager it is the national media.
About the stalking...apparently he used to check Terri's mileage on her car. Nice husband...huh? How many husbands would do that? How many would even care? He's a control freak to the bitter end.
A diagnosis of PVS means nothing more nor less than that a particular doctor is unable to find any stimulus that produces a demonstrably cognitive response. In some cases, the stimuli and responses may be pretty obvious. E.g. say someone's name, and the person may turn to face you and say "Yes?" In other cases, the stimuli and responses can be subtle. Wiggle someone's toe twice and observe that a few seconds later they wiggle it twice. Wiggle it three times an observe that a few seconds later the wiggle it three times. In any case, the harder one looks the more likely one is to find some cognition if it's there. Failing to find anything doesn't mean much if one doesn't look very hard.
I would suggest that a required clinical basis for a dignosis of PVS would be that a doctor who wants to find a patient not to be PVS is unable to find any stimulus that produces a clearly cognitive response. To avoid 'wishful thinking' diagnoses, doctors could be required to produce a testing protocol which would show cognitive abilities that could not be produced by chance. The general notion of the tests would be that a patient would receive stimuli randomly selected from a set chosen by the doctor; the doctor would then have to judge by some form of reaction by patient which stimulus had been given.
As a hypothetical example for Terri's case, Terri could have been played a sequence of voice clips, all with uniform speed and inflection, suggesting that she tense up or relax. If Terri had been able to recognize words, a doctor looking at a polygraph would be able to tell by Terri's reactions which type of clip was played. If Terri hadn't been able to recognize words, the doctor--no matter how much wishful thinking he may have had--would have been unable to distinguish "tense up" from "relax" responses at a rate better than chance.
I don't know how best to arrange the funding for doctors trying to diagnose patients as PVS or not-PVS, but IMHO it might be good to offer a significant incentive for doctors who can show that patients aren't PVS. After all, any fool can declare a patient PVS. In the case of one of Michael's doctors, it wouln't even have been necessary to look at the patient (although an actual visit was insisted upon--the phoniness of the diagnosis would be too obvious if the doctor didn't at least try to make it look credible). Proving someone not to be PVS can be somewhat harder, and should thus be worth more.
I'm sorry, perhaps I'm not academic enough to have been able to tell from your posts where you stand on the subject of euthanasia. Thanks for the information on PVS.
However, from the testimony related by a woman who had actually been in a diagnosed PVS state for a considerable time, it is impossible for the person to "react". Their minds still work just like yours and mine even though x-rays and tests seem to indicate otherwise. - She was on a feeding tube, felt the pain of them pulling it out, (they didn't use any pain medication because they had "diagnosed" her as a vegetable), she was off the feeding tube for eight days, but because of an infection, not because of a husband like Terri. She stated that she was literally screaming inside herself, "Please feed me, I am starving!" She said that the pain they inflicted on her with routine procedures not using pain meds was unbelievable. It was like being locked inside her body unable to move enough or to talk and tell anyone anything. After a while, she came out of it. I don't remember how long it was, but she seemed very intelligent and well spoken, and as I understand it, she hasn't been the only one diagnosed as PVS who has come back to say they were there all the time. I am sure she looked very disconnected on the outside and didn't react properly to anything either. She heard, but could not respond.
Over thiry years ago, I had a Down Syndrome baby. He passed away after surgery when he was six weeks old. I came away from that experience thinking very strongly that many times what is happening on the outside of a person has nothing much to do with what is really going on inside the person. There's so much we don't know.
What was the stalking of Cindy Shook about, and when was it supposed to have happened?
IF there were evidence I tought was clear and compelling that Terri Schiavo would want to be denied artificial feeding and hydration if she fell into a persistent vegetative state, and if I in fact believed that she was in an unrecoverable permanent vegetative state, and if Michael had allowed and would continue to allow efforts at oral feeding/hydration to be made by the parents and people they trusted, then I would not have been opposed to the removal of the feeding tube.
Had even one of those conditions been met, my opposition would have been weaker than it was. Had two been met, it would have been weaker still. But the fact that none of the conditions necessary to justify Terri's execution were satisfied makes it unmistakably clear that it was nothing short of murder.
BTW, how much of an academic would you have to be to recognize my comment in post #18 as bitter sarcasm? There's no way Doctor Cranford would ever say that he dismisses all attempts at communication as being "reflex". From his point of view, he's simply never seen any non-reflexive attempts at communication from any of the patients he's examined--even the one who could sort pegs by color.
She also indicated that this girlfriend testified that Mr. Schiavo really never knew what Terri wanted and said so several times while they dated each other.
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