Advanced brain scanning uncovered startling signs of awareness in a woman in a vegetative state, British scientists reported Thursday — a finding that complicates one of medicine's ethical minefields.
The work is sure to elicit pleas from families desperate to know if loved ones deemed beyond medical help have brain activity that doctors don't suspect. ''Can he or she hear and understand me?'' is a universal question.
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Those who don't improve after a longer period are classified as in a ''persistent vegetative state,'' such as the late Terri Schiavo, who became a subject of political controversy over the question of taking such patients off life support. An autopsy showed she had irreversible brain damage.
Vegetative Patients May Have Awareness
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CAN PATIENTS IN A VEGETATIVE STATE STILL HEAR? The case of Terri Schiavo has reignited the debate about what is going on in the mind of a person who is in a persistent vegetative state. Unlike people in comas, people in PVS are thought to be essentially oblivious to the outside world with no hope of awakening. But now provocative research in the journal Science suggests that the brain may still be able to respond to the human voice. Doctors in Belgium scanned the brain of a female patient in PVS while asking her to do things like imagine she was playing tennis. Her brain responses matched the patterns of normal people's brains when they were asked to imagine the same thing, suggesting the PVS patient may be "conscious" on some level. A related editorial points out though that this patient is likely not typical and that it's important not to generalize this finding to all patients in vegetative states.
Can You 'Wash' Away Your Sins?
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But this patient will recover? Are there any PVS patients out there who do not suffer from severe, probably irreversible brain damage? I swear, every time reporters depart from factual reporting and inject their bias into their stories, they turn into babbling morons.