Posted on 04/01/2005 11:52:28 PM PST by FairOpinion
The amount of medical misinformation put out about Terri Schiavo has been truly stunning. The testimony of Terri’s physicians who believe that some recovery is possible has been largely dismissed. Judge Greer’s court and the media in turn, have focused only on the pessimistic interpretations of the raw data of her CT scan.
A physician at a credible physicians’ website has analyzed Terri’s CAT scan and concludes that it has been grossly misrepresented. There is some cerebral atrophy, but it is a completely inaccurate to characterize it as “bag of water.” Furthermore, the author states that
“the most alarming thing about this image, however, is that there certainly is cortex left. Granted, it is severely thinned, especially for Terri's age, but I would be nonplussed if you told me that this was a 75 year old female who was somewhat senile but fully functional, and I defy a radiologist anywhere to contest that.”
In one of the definitive court battles in 2002, five physicians examined Terri to determine if therapy would be of further benefit. Two chosen by Terri’s parents believed that she was not in a “persistent vegetative state” and that some recovery was possible. Two chosen by Michael Schiavo held that she had no chance of recovery, as did the “neutral” physician appointed by the court. This 3-2 decision was key in the 2003 attempt to pull her feeding tube.
One of Michael Schiavo’s medical experts was the right-to-die advocate Dr. Ronald Cranford, who has been an expert in a number other key court cases on our nation’s slippery slope to euthanasia, including those of Nancy Cruzan and Robert Wedlund. But Dr. Cranford has made serious errors in other cases when prognosticating about the prospects of neurological recovery. Frederica Mathewes-Green states that Sgt. David Mack, who was shot in the line of duty as a policeman, was diagnosed by Cranford as
"definitely...in a persistent vegetative state...never [to] regain cognitive, sapient functioning...never [to] be aware of his condition."
Twenty months after the shooting Mack woke up, and eventually regained nearly all his mental ability. When asked by a reporter how he felt, he spelled out on his letterboard, "Speechless!"
In fact, the entire field of diagnosing “persistent vegetative state” or “PVS” is fraught with inaccuracy. Recent studies have shown the rate of misdiagnosis to be as high as 37% or even 43%. PVS is a clinical diagnosis, meaning that it depends on the subjective judgment of the examining physician. Experts in the field cannot even agree on the usefulness of diagnostic imaging.
Dr. Ronald Cranford himself was upset about the articles showing the inaccuracy of diagnosis and prognostication about PVS. Childs and Mercer, authors of one of the studies citing the difficulties of diagnosing PVS, took Cranford to task for “zealously” promoting the concept of the "permanent vegetative state" despite the evidence of its problematic nature, and the regularity with which some patients recover from it .
The nomenclature of “persistent vegetative state” was coined in 1972 by Jennett and Plum in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. The original article, “Persistent Vegetative State: A syndrome in search of a name” seems to have succeeded in its task as reclassifying severely cognitively disabled humans as non-persons - something akin to vegetables in the minds of many. Public perception of this highly-charged term predisposes many to dismiss the lives of human beings as no more significant than plant life. It is a brilliant, if chilling, masterstroke of propaganda, one which has been swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
This reclassification of non-terminally ill people has allowed for their dehydration and starvation deaths in Britain with a doctor’s recommendation, and in many states in the USA with the family’s wishes (or a patient’s own advance directives). The medical literature is rife with arrogant pronouncements in editorials of learned journals, such as life itself not being of “benefit” to someone in the PVS state. The echoes of current bioethics doublespeak resound in these journals.
In some respects the “persistent vegetative state” is more a political than a medical diagnosis, as it allows its unfortunate victims to lose their right to life and be medically killed through withholding food and water. It is unfortunate that some of the experts on the side of the Culture of Death seem to have had the upper hand in Terri’s fight, and have been portrayed by the media as reasonable and responsible members of the medical profession, rather than the zealots which, in fact, some of their own medical colleagues have branded them.
Once again, you beg the question.
The REAL question is whether Terri was dying--that is, whether other bodily functions were shutting down on their own.
The answer is "nope."
And it IS a moral obligation to feed and hydrate patients who are otherwise living, even if they don't meet your personal standards of "living."
...and not ALL Christians belive that nuking Japan was the correct tactical move.
So what?
Not medically accurate.
Tell you what. If you want to kill something by starvation, buy a sick horse. Only don't do it in Texas, because you'll be arrested for mistreatment and neglect of the horse.
Think, Man. Review your history. "J'Accuse!" was a popular movie utilized in Germany to jump-start the acceptance of euthanasia in that country. The story line was about a man who killed his wife out of "mercy." Within years, the categories of those who could legally be killed had grown. In the Netherlands, doctors began quietly killing terminal patients to empty beds earlier and save healthcare funds. They lobbied for the right to do so legally and won. They continue to kill even more people, illegally. The next law allowed killing of children, and now the "doctors" of the Netherlands recently announced that they had been killing sick newborns, lobbied and won the right to do so legally. Belgium has followed.
When there is discrimination between which humans are human enough for protection from killing and which ones may be killed - or even ordered killed while their mothers and fathers are forbidden to offer a spoonful of water to their daughter - the categories of those who are killed increase, the treatment of the borderline cases becomes less careful, until finally the horror becomes so great that the very name of the facility or political group becomes synonymous with evil. Phnom Penn, Auschwitz, Dachau, Andersonville.
Suppose I sued a manufacturer because I received a bunch of lugnuts which were made of inferior metal and would fracture easily, but when a judge examined the lug nuts, he declared that they were just fine. Suppose further that I removed the lugnuts from the wheels of the judge's car and I replaced them with the ones the judge declared to be just fine. Consequently, the wheels fell off the judge's car, he got in an accident, and died.
Could I be prosecuted for murder for deliberatly putting inferior lugnuts on the judge's car? Or could I argue that the court had proven the lugnuts were not inferior and so consequently they could not have been expected to fail?
False dilemma.
The tube was the answer, still is.
OTOH, you militate for actively killing by removing food/hydration.
There's a fairly clear difference.
If you propose to put the inferior lugnuts on GrimGreer's car, I find no fault in you, subjectively.
Objectively, of course, you are in the same category as Mikey and Grim, and their co-conspirator, Lover of Thanatos, Felos.
I wish Greer would go sailing out among the mangroves in a boat with a nice tall metal mast...
Objectively, of course, you are in the same category as Mikey and Grim, and their co-conspirator, Lover of Thanatos, Felos.
You mean 'would be'? I wouldn't actually sabotage Greer's car, nice as the thought might be. I am somewhat curious, though, about the legal effect of contrafactual "legal facts". Among other things, if it could be shown that the court order for Terri's execution was predicated upon deliberate fraud by Michael and Felos, could they be charged with murder? What exactly would have to be proven, and what would be the burdens of proof?
Yours is one of the few intelligent comments upon the entire affair.
If I may offer a slightly different perspective, please consider that man was originally created body, soul and spirit. After the fall in the Garden, man suffered a separation of his spirit from God,...a form of death as in a state of existence involving separation.
Today, all humans are born physically with bodily life in the womb, genetically inheriting the same nature as original man,...dead in the spirit and condemned in that death.
Upon birth from the body, God immediately grants souls life upon the man. At his point of our lives we are body and soul.
Upon faith alone in Christ alone, God is free in His holiness (i.e. Hie perfect justice and perfect righteousness, to once again regenerate a spirit life in that man who has faith.)
Whatever God ordains only He may remove. Where He has ordained a spirit life, it is returned to Him by His plan.
Man might confuse the issue by associating the flesh or body, with the entirely of man, but this fails to address a multitude of experience, testimony, and simply life of soul and spirit.
The Christian or believer today has a relationship with God, not held by other believers prior to the first Advent of Christ. Upon regeneration, each believer is now filled with the Holy Spirit, who makes his body a temple to God. That temple now may be indwelt by the Son as the Shekinah Glory.
We are able to live as royal priests as members of His family in His Body as the Church. There exists a protocol by which God allows our souls to be rejuvenated and sanctified over time by continuing faith and inculcation of Bible doctrine on a daily basis and applying it in all aspects of life,..in body, soul and spirit.
While we are here, prior to the first death, we have an opportunity to advance in His plan for us. This doesn;t mean there isn;t suffering,...quite the contrary there are many sufferings used by God as a method for the believer to advance spiritually. The trick is not to allow our blessings to be turned into cursings, but rather turn our cursings into blessings by remaining faithul in all things to Him.
When we sin, prior to the frst death, by 1John 1:9, we are able to confess those sins to God and He is sure and just to forgive us those sins, returning us into a growing relationship with Him.
The longer we live, the more opportunity we have to glorify Him amongst others who are not yet believers, but also have an opportunity to glorify Him prior to the first death.
Man is unable to control the spirit being removed from the body and taken to heaven with the Father. However, we are able, after regeneration to control our thinking, return to Him in our thinking or our soul, and follow his method for us to live in body, in our thinking and in our spirit.
This doesn;t preclude us from bearing our burdens, nor from helping our fellow man who may be destitute in things of the body. Likewise, even if we seem to have last nearly everything of the body, we still have our soul to control and worship Him and glorify Him in our thinking. Our spirit is grown from the sanctification of the soul, and even though a bodily, physical identification of our brain to our thinking may exist for many physical things, they don't prove no soul exists separate from the physical.
There is a reason why Terri didn't die in the body, prior to the efforts to starve her and it might not have been for any man to know why whe remained alive. I do hope she remained faithful to him, and even if she sinned, returned to Him in her soul and confessed those sins directly to Him through Christ prior to her first death, to further glorify God.
I suspect she did, and now has been promoted by His will where her remaining here would have been good for nothingness, ...not that the starving of her by man was just, nor that man's intervention had anything to do with her relationship with God,...it didn't, rather no person dies without that death having been planned and known by God. Her death, I suspect served a prominent example to other persons as to the mechanics of death. It also may have served as a testing of our government and our nation to manifest our true spiritual condition.
How do you absolutely know that the death by dehydration is *agonizing*?
When the body is shutting down, it is not the agonizing death you purport it to be.
It is peaceful and more or less painless. It is a way of NATURAL death for people when the natural means of receiving food and water becomes impossible.
More specifically, in Terri Schiavo's situation, the feeding tube supplanted the natural means and made its withdrawal appear to be inhumane.
Prolonging her life was inhumane and presuming man's means to prolong life more important than the way her body had already shut down YEARS ago.
You believe that she could have *relearned* chewing and swallowing through therapy.
Since the part of the brain which predicates that ability was no longer in existence, this potentiality was not a true possibility.
Her body had shut down over ten years ago, but the feeding tube bypassed that shutting down process.
I did not conflate the Pope's situation with Terri Shiavo's. You did.
According the the facts of law, yes, the potassium imbalance was caused by Terri Schiavo's bulimia.
Morally certain? I cannot know that.
By the same token, you argue for the Schindlers as if you know it to be morally true.
Is it truly irrelevant what and when the Schindlers have chosen to argue or propose certain conditions regarding other people? If you are the moral arbiter, could be.
TM129: **If someone cannot chew or swallow their food, AND they cannot respond to queries (inactive brain), should society or individuals consider it a responsibility to unnaturally feed the person via a gastric feeding tube?**
NN: Ummmnnhh...NOBODY on this thread has suggested "...unwarranted extreme burdens..." or "...unnaturally extending life..."
So just exactly what are you trying to say?
I am suggesting that a feeding tube unnaturally extends life beyond God's purposes in a body that He has allowed to begin shutting down (the body can no longer chew or swallow food).
Why give a veneer of respectability to a poster who makes a sick comment like the following, knowing that it was ONLY Michael in line for the lawsuit monies: "The Schindlers certainly appeared not to have disputed the bulimia claim when it meant possible money for them."
It is inappropriate to lump together ALL Christians as being opposed to a feeding tube removal.
Some Christians believe it to be appropriate and merciful.
*YOU* believe it is a moral obligation to feed and hydrate patients who are otherwise living.
I do not believe the body is capable of living if the body can no longer chew, eat or swallow their food, AND their brain is not functioning enough to assist them in swallowing.
Morally I disagree with you. I believe in God, and I believe differently than you. That does not make you morally superior to me.
I do not believe animals should be more important than human beings.
I do not believe that people should be force fed when their bodily functions to process food have shut down permanently. I believe that God ordains that process and a feeding tube supplants God's purposes for that person.
Nope.
I disagree with you.
You offered, "I do not believe the body is capable of living if the body can no longer chew, eat or swallow their food, AND their brain is not functioning enough to assist them in swallowing." Considering Stephen Hawking and a long list of other humans who you would put down by withholding nutrition and water, is there something else you would like to add to your offerings, perhaps regarding the alive unborn, before many of your fellow Freepers place you on the ignore list?
Too late to answer your posting in full. Lots of food for thought in yours, and I appreciate your thoughtful expression.
Tomorrow!
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