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Bioethicist David Wendler of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, US and colleagues wondered whether a formula could be used to better predict a patient’s wishes. They examined information collected by pollsters and scientists about the attitudes towards medical care held by the general US population.
The data suggested that most people want life-saving treatment if there is at least a 1% chance that following the intervention they would have the ability to reason, remember and communicate. If there is less than a 1% chance, people generally say they would choose not to have the treatment.
“The difference between zero and 1% is all the difference in the world for someone,” says Wendler.
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However, critics caution that computer algorithms should never supplant human surrogates. “I believe it would be extremely irresponsible to allow machines to make decisions involving life and death,” says Bobby Schindler, brother of Terri Schiavo. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years until she died in 2005 after doctors removed her feeding tube. Her case sparked huge debate in the US.
”If a person becomes incapacitated, is not dying, and can assimilate food and water via a feeding tube, then I believe that we are morally obligated to care for the person and provide them this basic care – regardless of a computer attempting to ‘predict’ what that person’s wishes might be,” Schindler adds.
“Essentially, you would be allowing a machine to determine what is ethical, what is right and wrong, which no machine is able to do.”
Can computers make life-or-death medical decision?
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Sounds like Terri's Legacy left a mark.
With the rise of the Values Action Team, the Christian Right abandoned long-shot gambits such as eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and pushing for a Right to Life Amendment to the Constitution. It adopted a more incremental approach to pursuing its agenda, such as helping move legislation that gradually endowed personhood on unborn fetuses as a way to slowly chip away at abortion rights. "It's a much more typical approach of how America deals with social issues," said Senator Sam Brownback, chairman of the Senate VAT, launched a few years after its House counterpart. "It's rare that there's big, revolutionary type change. It's much more of an evolutionary type of process."
Of course, that was before few outside of Florida had heard the name Terri Schiavo.
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