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I guess web designers, like some un-named others here, are the determiners of medical fact.....

From Orlando Sentinel

Schiavo images touch emotions

By Maya Bell
Sentinel Staff Writer

October 27, 2003

A potent picture is hard to ignore, and in the case of Terri Schiavo, the power of her image -- propped up in bed, eyes open, seemingly smiling at her mother -- has been incalculable.

Her parents have fought in the courts for years to keep her alive and lost at every turn, but Bob and Mary Schindler won last week in the court of public opinion, thanks in part to TV and Internet news clips that spurred tens of thousands of people to demand action from Gov. Jeb Bush and the Florida Legislature.

"I've seen the videos. I see the joy in her face," said Cheryl Thomas, who wrote Bush after viewing the snippets on TV news from her Montana home. "She's exuberant. Her whole face lights up. She is very much aware. The governor had to do something."

Bush and the Legislature agreed, passing an unprecedented -- and many legal experts say, unconstitutional -- law allowing the governor to override the court-ordered removal of the feeding tube that has kept the severely brain-damaged woman alive for 13 years. The tube was reinserted after a six-day hiatus.

Although the governor said he was acting out of personal conviction, he has said he felt "compelled to give voice" to the thousands of people who have communicated their concerns in the Schiavo case.

And, according to Pamela Hennessy, a Schindler family volunteer who first posted the video snippets on the family Web site, terrisfight.org, in December, the recordings energized many of those voices.

"That was a turning point," Hennessy said. "I was getting a ton of e-mails from people who were just horrified. They were led to believe here was a woman trapped in bed, hooked to a machine, clinically brain-dead. This is what they thought, but what they see is, yes, a very disabled woman but someone who is definitely aware."

Perception vs. reality

But many experts say the videos, made public after a court hearing last year, distort the reality of Terri Schiavo's condition.

They say most lay people, including her parents, have trouble reconciling the image of her tracking a balloon with her eyes or smiling at her mother's kiss with what doctors and judges say are the facts: She is unaware. She is not responding. She is unconscious. But, like most patients in a persistent vegetative state, she has wake and sleep cycles characterized by involuntary movements that seem to mimic emotions.

"What's gotten the Legislature to act is the coverage of her blinking and moving. They think maybe she's disabled or retarded," said Bill Allen, co-director of the Florida Bioethics Network. "I think people would take a different view if every time they saw her blinking, an expert neurologist would explain a picture of her brain scan. It would show her brain is mush."

Ron Cranford, one of five neurologists who examined Terri Schiavo and her brain scans for an October 2002 court hearing, said her cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that controls thought and awareness, is severely atrophied and has all but disintegrated. He said that process began when she collapsed from a potassium imbalance in 1990, enduring five critical minutes without oxygen, and has progressed over the years.

"There is hardly any cerebral cortex left," Cranford said. "It looks like a black hole."

Explaining the images

He and a number of medical experts also take great umbrage at news media outlets that continue to describe Terri Schiavo as comatose. Patients in comas may wake up again, but those in persistent vegetative states don't -- especially after 13 years.

Coupled with the misleading video images, they say, inaccuracy is further confusing the public.

Kelly McBride, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute, a journalism-education center in St. Petersburg, agreed.

"Those videos can be taken out of context," she said. "By using them as B-roll, which is the film under the voice-over, or by simply presenting them without context, journalists are inaccurately using and explaining them, and that is swaying public opinion."

Ironically, the videos were recorded to help Pinellas Circuit Judge George W. Greer decide whether Schiavo could improve with treatment, as her parents insist, or has no hope of recovery, as her husband and her doctors argue.

Greer held a hearing on those questions last October. After hearing from the five doctors and watching hours of unedited videotaped examinations of Terri Schiavo, he agreed with three doctors who said she was in a persistent vegetative state and could not recover. Two of three, including Cranford, were selected by Michael Schiavo and one by the court. The two doctors selected by the Schindlers disagreed, basing their opinions primarily on Schiavo's response to brief stimuli, mostly involving contact with her mother.

The 2nd District Court of Appeal later agreed with Greer after a panel of three judges watched the tapes in their entirety.

Lawmakers did not do the same, nor review any medical testimony, before passing the bill giving the governor the power to restore Schiavo's artificial feedings. That, in part, is what outrages many critics of the unprecedented action.

UF's Allen said that is as preposterous as it would be to allow the Colorado Legislature to decide Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant's guilt on rape charges based on what they've seen on television.

But from where Hennessy sits, the videos are not only powerful but empowering, motivating untold numbers of people to do something about what they perceived as a grave injustice. She is her own best example.

A Web designer from Clearwater, Hennessy had for years watched the Schiavo-Schindler drama from the sidelines and thought it was time for Schiavo's parents to let her go.

She changed her mind when she first saw the videos. She couldn't stop sobbing. Suddenly, Schiavo was no longer an inert "vegetable" but a person whom the court would allow to starve to death.

Now Hennessy, an agnostic and a Green Party member, finds herself aligned with the religious right and anti-abortion activists now protesting outside Terri Schiavo's hospice.

She linked the videos to the Schindler family Web site in December, and seven months later launched a petition drive demanding the governor's intervention. It generated nearly 170,000 e-mails from around the world.

"Years ago, I would have said, 'I'm not going to get involved. I'm not going to vote. It doesn't matter,' " Hennessy said. "Well, it does matter. All these people who came forward to speak for Terri came forward one by one."

I guess web designers, like some un-named others here, are the determiners of medical fact.....

And there are "un-named others" here on FR who have determined that Terri Schindler Schiavo is "brain dead" -- a "medical fact" unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.

Oh, and then there's one here who has declared Terri Schindler Schiavo "a freak of nature."

Let's have no false modesty here: That person was you.

daylate-dollarshort asserts "medical fact" that Terri Schiavo is a "freak of nature"

daylate-dollarshort reaffirms the "medical fact" that Terri Schiavo is a "freak of nature"

"Two of three, including Cranford, were selected by Michael Schiavo and one by the court.

So, all that proves is that ONE DOCTOR agreed with MS's paid shills.

Why kill an innocent woman while denying that person the same appeals and checks that are granted a murderer already proven guilty in a full jury trial.

Here, we have NOTHING but the unsubsupported hearsay evidence of the one person who wants her dead. And that person is the one most intimately involved with the circumstances that caused her to black out!