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To: Ohioan from Florida
From medpundit:
Rangel accuses Dr. Bradley and myself of confusing the issue, medically speaking, by comparing Terri Schiavo to cerebral palsy. In fact, the Schiavo case isn’t 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.

414 posted on 02/05/2006 4:07:24 AM PST by syriacus (Congress: Get experts to discuss current standards of medical care for the sickest Americans.)
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To: syriacus
Here's a column from a guy named Markel at The New Republic Online who thought he had good arguments against the comparison of Terri and CP patients.

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.

416 posted on 02/05/2006 4:25:17 AM PST by syriacus (Congress: Get experts to discuss current standards of medical care for the sickest Americans.)
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To: syriacus
From your earlier post: HIE (hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy) is associated with substantial mortality in newborns and infants, and with significant morbidity over longer periods. Translation: it kills some babies and its complications keep multiplying and killing victims later in their lives.

Terri's still unexplained injury was more severe than those commonly suffered in birth problems.

422 posted on 02/05/2006 5:35:14 AM PST by T'wit (As they say: If you like the law, sausage or Bill Clinton, don't watch them being made.)
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To: syriacus; All

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.


481 posted on 02/06/2006 10:08:13 AM PST by Ohioan from Florida (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.- Edmund Burke)
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