Posted on 11/01/2013 6:52:49 AM PDT by Salman
A patient in a seemingly vegetative state, unable to move or speak, showed signs of attentive awareness that had not been detected before, a new study reveals. This patient was able to focus on words signalled by the experimenters as auditory targets as successfully as healthy individuals. If this ability can be developed consistently in certain patients who are vegetative, it could open the door to specialised devices in the future and enable them to interact with the outside world.
The research, by scientists at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC CBSU) and the University of Cambridge, is published today, 31 October, in the journal Neuroimage: Clinical.
For the study, the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), which non-invasively measures the electrical activity over the scalp, to test 21 patients diagnosed as vegetative or minimally conscious, and eight healthy volunteers. Participants heard a series of different words -- one word a second over 90 seconds at a time -- while asked to alternatingly attend to either the word 'yes' or the word 'no', each of which appeared 15% of the time. (Some examples of the words used include moss, moth, worm and toad.) This was repeated several times over a period of 30 minutes to detect whether the patients were able to attend to the correct target word.
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(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
I thought is said “President,” not “Patient!”
LOL!
Remember Terry Schiavo and mourn.
MATTHEW 25:40
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
While in theory this should be positive and hopeful news, it is pretty unlikely that anyone needing this type of care will be allowed to continue living under the future of health care in America.
There's a God up there and I can't even imagine what he thinks.
We're supposed to be compassionate and loving...not play God.
Sounds like a perfect candidate for Congress.
After reading the title, I only came here thinking this was about the American Electorate.
All this while the government organizes Death Panels for the Elderly and Infirm?
I just read this amazing biography written by a man with “locked-in syndrome,” who was only able to blink one eye. He blinked out the book, letter by letter, letting us understand that his mind was fully alert every waking hour, while on the outside he appeared “vegetative.”
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” refers to the iron diving bell he felt trapped under, while the butterfly was his free roaming imagination.
Imagine yourself in a vegetative state.
Unable to move, unable to speak, but your mind working fine.
Your family comes in and sits with you and speking to you ,but you cannot answer, all you can do is lie there watching their emotions. Or maybe you are there and no one comes to see you, you just lie there day after day, hour after miserable hour.
Not me pal Choke me ,shoot me, or drug me, to a real death, not this hell on earth.
My thoughts exactly.
Yep, just came here optimistically in a glass-half-full mode.
I can’t imagine living like that....my thoughts exactly.
What you are saying reminds me of the Metallica video. One:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw
If at least some such patients do experience such awareness, I wonder if that could be detected as brain activity using PET scans - if so, at the very least, that approach could be used as a means of saving some individuals (death panels notwithstanding) who still maintain some level of consciousness; optimally, observing such brain activity might allow a means of tracking therapeutic attempts to break someone out of that sort of vegetative state.
My husband was like that in his final days from brain cancer. As the process went on, he was down to blinking, could not speak or move his arms or legs. After blinking went away, I knew that hearing is the last ability to lose, so I stayed there every day talking to him. Then, one night he died. I have no regrets about my actions through his illness as I did everything possible medically and psychologically to help him. I didn’t send him to hospice where they pour in morphine until the patient dies. I kept him in the hospital getting fluids so he would die naturally.
I went to the hospice place and went through their facility, and determined it is a killing place. They had a room set aside for the funeral home so you could make funeral arrangements. Then, I talked to the doctor and she told me no one comes out of there alive, they go there to die. That’s what I saw when I was there.
Somehow I think you will feel differently when you are in that position. But, I forgot, you won’t be able to tell anyone.
Always choose life over death.
I agree. Our medical advances have created a new living hell that didn't use to exist. A prior poster said, "always choose life". I say, "always choose eternal life."
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