Posted on 09/11/2006 8:17:41 PM PDT by aculeus
We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state - doctors can only make a sufferer's last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking ... a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. Steve Boggan witnesses these 'strange and wonderful' rebirths
For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, "Hello." Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.
Three hundred miles away, Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as "a cabbage", greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.
Across the Atlantic in the United States, George Melendez, who is also brain-damaged, has lain twitching and moaning as if in agony for years, causing his parents unbearable grief. He, too, is given this little tablet and again, it's as if a light comes on. His father asks him if he is, indeed, in pain. "No," George smiles, and his family burst into tears.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
I hope it's permanent.
Deena Burnett .. NOW ON CSPAN-2!
It's comments like that that turn people off. Keep thinking in your mind that people take you seriously. They're not.
Don't take it so personal. It's like some scent is released for the Calvary.
Ah, did you or did you not just say this:
...and then noticed you just sort of jumped in and started swingin at everyone...
I can't decide whether you really can't remember what you've just posted, or are just being disengenuous.
Okay... truce... Fine to jump in on that, but why misuse a dead woman's name in the process? Do you understand how despicable that is? Terri wasn't the one posting that crap.
People who speak for Terri were the ones posting "that crap," as you say.
All I noticed is things were moving along and the discussion was fine and then you posted the trigger word which I'm sure you knew would flame things. But then again that's what you are so good at.
I don't agree with those people Howlin.
They don't speak for me.
I don't agree with those people Howlin.
They don't speak for me.
Fine? Somebody said they hoped Hildy died!
Fine, my butt.
In the article, one patient had not responded for five years, yet the gaba blocking action allowed structure that was there to respond. Terri had been responsive for many years though only minimally and in a declining pattern toward the end of her life. If the brain begins to shrink, areas of the brain lose their responsiveness to input, whole tissue complexes disappear, thus actual structure is gone. I think this is to what the retired doctor was referring.
They speak for ALL people who want to discuss abortion and/or death on this forum.
Thanks. It is a disgraceful, Nazi-like medical term when applied to a human being, which should shame everyone in the medical practices.
I'm watching. Thanks. :)
Following the law is always the proper course of action. Especially when the facts are ambiguous.
2. Does the patient's brain have to be basically anatomically intact?
what does "basically anatomically intact" require
I hesitate to bring it up, seeing the reactions of various people here. I was thinking of Terri Schiavo, among others. There are brain-injured people whose brain appears basically intact on CT scan, but hers showed severe atrophy.
WOW ... he really touched so many people, didn't he? He truly was a godly man.
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