(HealthNewsDigest.com) - NEW YORK (March 9, 2007) -- Headline-grabbing news stories involving severely brain-damaged patients such as Terri Schiavo and Terry Wallis aren't doing much to clear up the public's confusion surrounding brain injury and the likelihood that specific patients will recover, say experts at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
But more and better research on the issue -- especially a nationwide, epidemiological study on just how and where severely brain-injured patients are being cared for -- could help, according to a commentary written by NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell physician-scientists and published recently in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The paper reports on an Institutes of Medicine (IOM) exploratory meeting on disorders of consciousness.
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We wept in approval when Hillary Swank asked her instructor to pull the plug in the Oscar-winning film, Million Dollar Baby. She played a boxer who was so badly injured in a match that she would never be able to pursue the dream that had defined her entire life. In perhaps the world’s most famous euthanasia case, most of us supported Terri Schiavo’s husband when he wanted to take her off life support.
She had been in deep coma for 15 years, and when doctors finally conceded that there was no chance of her recovering, her husband, Michael, said his wife had never wanted to live like a robot programmed by a machine. But to enable his wife’s right to die with dignity, he had to first fight his in-laws and a slew of Republican conservatives who charged him with murder. And back home in India, when the Andhra Pradesh High Court dismissed the euthanasia plea of 25-year-old Venkatesh — a man who was dying from muscular dystrophy and wanted to donate his organs while his body still worked — we wondered whether the decision had been thought through.
But the opponents of euthanasia — and there are many — would accuse us of mealy-mouthed sentimentalism. Mercy killing, they say, is pitched as the ultimate act of love, when it is, in fact, the ultimate act of selfishness.
Live and let die? by Barkha Dutt | Third Eye
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