Posted on 02/18/2005 6:25:20 AM PST by wotan
You do know that in the 70's we did open heart surgery on newborns because we believed they were unable to feel pain?
There are your gods of science and medicine showing their ugly faces..tsk, tsk, wrong again.
Don't leave, we're having fun now.
....crickets chirping......
No signs of life from Heisenberg in about an hour. I think he/she/it is in a coma. What should we do?
I've thought of that many times when reading about Terri's insulin overdoses.
I used the links therein to sign petitions and email Jeb Bush.
There is something more evil in this case than most horror films.
Baden and Gray on Greta to the contrary notwithstanding, I am not aware of any such "bulimic condition" and dismiss all of that as the further unscrupulous means used by Michael and his attorneys to defraud taxpayers and kill Terri.
As a historian of sorts, I have often had this thought. If you go back and follow all the feeding tube cases, you begin with a lot of spouses who probably meant well, and then gradually you begin to see some not-so-well-meaning stuff creeping in. And then at the very end it's blatantly not about mercy anymore.
Which should be a big red flag for all that it is exactly the slippery slope it was predicted to be. But even in smaller ways than what was thought.
Melas, you must learn that on these threads facts don't count for very much. The laws of any Schiavo thread is such: Everything would be honky dory if only her monster husband would let her get therapy. But they never talk about the first five or so years when he dedicated his life to try to save her, dragging her around the Country looking for treatments. Going back to school to become a nurse....but again, facts don't matter here. Now, since you're outed yourself as a rational, thinking human being, be prepared to be called every name in the book for even suggesting that her condition is irreversible, which puts you in agreement with every court that has handled this case.
What do you mean you're not "aware" of the bulemic condition. It's a fact. She was bulemic and abused diuretics and probably laxatives which left her body in short supply of potassium. In high school she weighed over 200 pounds, when she died she was about 120. She had weight issues. That is how she ended up in the condition she's in. She did it to herself. Schiavo might not be the man of the year, but to dismiss the facts is just not right.
I agree with you Phil; I don't believe the bulemia story. Regardless, even if that were true, I don't believe that it was the bulemia which caused her to have a heart attack. I don't believe it was the bulemia which caused her to have osteoporosis which made her susceptible to such fractures and broken bones to her back, ribs, thigh, ankles, as Felos and HINO assert. I don't recall reading about or hearing about any of Terri's treating physicians coming forth, or being deposed, who testified that Terri had such a brittle bone condition, bulemic condition, heart condition, before, during or after trial....just LAWYERS have been claiming that.
Sigh...I'm afraid you're right Hildy. I can't count the times I've read on these threads that Schiavo is trying to kill Terri because he's afraid she'll wake up and finger him for trying to kill her. Well, if water turns to brain tissue, I suppose that can happen. These people need to face facts. Terri is decerebrated, she's not getting any better, ever.
Obviously Terry's case is extreme. You are way off base. This is someone who has not been alive in any true sense in 15 years.
My son would be dead also if not for a C-section.
Obviously Terry's case is extreme. You are way off base. This is someone who has not been alive in any true sense in 15 years.
And obviously she's not terminally ill. Just needs food and water like the rest of us. You are way off base if you think starving and dehydrating the disabled to death is acceptable practice for the U.S. It was however completely acceptable in Nazi Germany where they starved first the disabled children to death, then they went for the old people.
Other cases in the long line of euthanasia cases were about people who were less functional and also quite a bit more functional.
A few of those patients were either tooling around in a wheelchair or painting pictures. One was an elderly woman who kept begging the staff for food and water. This woman was dehydrated to death because the court ruled she was not competent to make her own decision about whether or not she should be fed.
It's wrong to focus on Terri and decide she should die because of her lack of ability or ability. That takes us right into the pre-Nazi thinking of eugenics and utilitarianism. That's where we are heading, anyway, into a country of life or death decision-making by bioethics committees who judge your ability as worthy or unworthy of life.
Terri has not been labeled by medical experts as braindead, but as having PVS. PVS is a highly controversial diagnosis which is made with a great deal of subjection on the part of the physician(s) making it. There is no gold standard for diagnosing it. It's just what a physician decides after observation.
That said, even the gold standards fail from time to time, so reliance on them to put someone to death is not a good choice either. In 29 years as a medical professional I have seen several astounding cases of patients who had lab values incompatible with life, that later got up and walked away to go home to normal lives again.
There are countless miracles and stories to testify to this happening as well.
So when and where can we be trusted to decide someone should die? Never.
Medicine is not a science but an art. As I have posted here many times lately to make this point, in the 1970's we did open heart surgery and others on newborn infants without anesthesia because the prevailing belief at that time was that newborns did not have nervous systems which were highly enough developed to feel pain. The high mortality rate has been (now) partly attributed to the lack of anesthesia.
We have to look at individuals as always worthy of life because to do otherwise is to repeat history, albeit German history. And very soon, Dutch history.
"The authors of the article describing Karen Quinlan's pathological findings draw attention to the limitations of our understanding of the neuroanatomical basis for human consciousness. At one time consciousness was though to reside in the cortex, then came our understanding of the limbic system and the role of the brain stem reticular formation in cerebral arousal. The findings in Karen Quinlan's brain suggested that the thalamus played a more crucial role in consciousness and awareness than was previously thought."
Thank you!
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