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Thank you for your speedy reply and the courtesy in your words. I do realize that I misused quotation marks in my initial post. I have been up to my ears in APA-style papers for the past month and was shocked to see that I had made an such an error. For my benefit only I will repeat what I have learned tonight: You only use quotes when the authors words are being reproduced verbatim. I must also say that it is refreshing and inspiring to find someone that also believes that good grammar and spelling should not exclusively exist offline.

Dr. Frist's comments on March 20 were interpreted by myself and others as a diagnosis. The small quote that I provided for you was all that I could find on short notice that was not a paraphrase. His comments also appeared to be dismissal of previous diagnoses by doctors more closely related to the personal care of Terri Schaivo. It is widely recognized that the majority of doctors in that specialty that actually met Ms. Schaivo concurred with the initial assessment and concluded that she was in fact PVS.

No worries, friend. I'm not an obsessive stickler for spelling and grammar, though I do notice deviations from the rules of grammar here and there. Your use of quotes was incongruous and just plain wrong: it really suggested you didn't know their proper use.

As for your interpretation of Dr. Frist's comments, reasonable people can disagree on that, of course, and as you say you are merely stating your opinion on the impression Frist's comments gave you.

My interpretation rests mostly on his explicit use of a variation of the word 'question.' I take that literally - based on what he saw (and what he said he saw, admittedly limited information - and Frist wouldn't disagree) he questions the conclusion of some of the doctors (but not all of the doctors, as there were doctors who examined Terri who disagreed with the consensus diagnosis).

So all Frist did was question (and literally question, as he offered no explicit diagnosis) the conclusions of some of the doctors.

Now if he explicitly said she was in his medical opinion not in a PVS (or was in a PVS), that would be a diagnosis. He didn't do that, and in fact came nowhere close, regardless of your impressions on the quote you provided.

In any case, I hope you can see how your paraphrase really didn't convey what Frist said at all. Nowhere in the quote does he say she was conclusively not in a PVS, and that he was offering his medical opinion.

Many on FR had a strange fixation on the Schiavo case as it developed (and evidently, some still do). In any case, that isn't license to

In any event, the situations are not comparable. One medical professional wrote a thick book that explicitly gives a medical diagnosis at length about a subject they never examined. Another medical professional questioned the diagnosis of some doctors (but not all) based on admittedly limited information he saw.

Questioning a medical conclusion isn't the same as a diagnosis - for example, it might just simply be a call for more medical examination. That much is certainly possible, your opinion notwithstanding.