Rangel accuses Dr. Bradley and myself of confusing the issue, medically speaking, by comparing Terri Schiavo to cerebral palsy. In fact, the Schiavo case isnt all that different from a severe case of cerebral palsy, which is also believed to be caused by oxygen deprivation or some other insult to the brain. And there are cases of severe cerebral palsy in which the patient is completely and totally disabled - as disabled as Terri Schiavo.
He had to back-pedal later, as we can see by these notes which were later added at the bottom of his column.
Corrections: This article originally stated that cerebral palsy is related to traumatic births--which is not always true. The article also stated that cerebral palsy patients do not "typically" have cognitive deficits. It is more accurate to say that they do not "always" have cognitive deficits. We regret the errors.*How nice of him to correct himself.(/sarcasm)
Too bad Markel, a criminal defense lawyer, couldn't get this right when he wrote the column a week before Terri died.
Terri's still unexplained injury was more severe than those commonly suffered in birth problems.
That medpundit link was a good read. Thanks for including that.
I watched a bit of a movie with my daughter the other day. It was called "Contact" and starred Jodie Foster and Matthew McConahey (sp?), and was made around 1997. It was very interesting in that there was a part where Jodie Foster's character launched out to space to make contact with 'aliens'. When she got back to earth, no one believed what she had experienced, because on earth it looked like she hadn't launched at all.
Even though she insisted that she was 'gone' for about 18 hours, the other scientists insisted that they only lost contact with her for about 45 seconds. While they had no contact with her, it was recorded as static on the monitors. One scientist, who didn't refute the possibility of her experiencing *something* during that time, had observed that when they looked at the amount of time that the static was recorded, she kept coming up with 18 hours of elapsed recorded time. The scientists finally realized that they didn't have the empirical information that could "explain" the difference between what they *thought* she experienced and what she insisted she experienced.
To me, it's the same with way Terri and many other brain-injured patients. We don't *know* what they experience, yet. Our science isn't good enough to explain it, yet. We know so little about the way the human body works, yet some of us are willing to put someone to death because we can't explain what is going on with that person.