LifeNews.com points to an article in the New Yorker which reveals some very startling information about consciousness in seemingly comatose or brain-dead people.
The LifeNews piece points out something that I, too, have noticed in almost every article on PVS since Terri Schiavo was murdered:
Bobby, Terri Schiavo's brother, has noticed that whatever the condition of the patient whose story is being told, the reports all have a common sub theme--the awakening, comprehension, etc. has nothing to do with Terri, meaning it was right to dehydrate her to death.
It is as these reports, to quote Shakespeare, "doth protest too much," as if there is a subliminal realization that a terrible injustice was done to her.
Notice this statement from the article which, to me, defies rational thought. It references several videos of Terri Schiavo (that few people have seen) clearly showing her responding to stimuli and trying to communicate.
In the video, a man’s voice can be heard praising Schiavo for opening her eyes in response to his instructions, and the neuroscientist told me that he was impressed until he muted the sound. “With the sound off, it is clear that her movements are random,” the neuroscientist said. “But, with the voice-over, it is easy to make a misdiagnosis.”
I find it hard to believe that an educated person could make a statement like this. When you don't observe the stimuli, it would probably be pretty easy to assume any response was "random," especially if that's what you wanted to believe. Such an irrational statement almost certainly indicates a strong unwillingness to be objective.
I fear that some people are so heavily invested in maintaining the fiction that Terri Schiavo was a brain-dead vegetable (because for those who supported the removal of her feeding tube to admit otherwise would be to admit they gave approval to the murder of a disabled woman who couldn't defend herself), that it will be difficult for the truth to come out, even as we learn more about the brain and human consciousness.
I mentioned "startling" information about consciousness earlier. The New Yorker article examines a "tennis experiment:"
Owen’s final experiment was the most ambitious: a test to determine whether vegetative patients who seemed able to comprehend speech could also perform a complex mental task on command. He decided to ask them to imagine playing tennis. (“We chose sports, and tried to find one that involved a lot of upper-body movements and not too much running around,” he said.) First, he took brain scans of thirty-four healthy volunteers who were instructed to picture themselves playing the game for at least thirty seconds. Their brains showed activity in a region of the cerebrum that would be stimulated in an actual match. “This was an extremely robust activation, and it wasn’t difficult to tell whether somebody was imagining tennis or not,” Owen said. He then repeated the experiment using one of the vegetative patients, a woman who had been severely injured in a car accident. The woman had to be able to hear and understand Owen’s instructions, retrieve a memory of tennis—including a conception of forehand and backhand and how the ball and the racquet meet—and focus her attention for at least thirty seconds. To Owen’s astonishment, she passed the test. “Lo and behold, she produced a beautiful activation, indistinguishable from those of the group of normal volunteers,” he said. (Another vegetative patient, a man in his twenties, also passed the test, though Owen, having learned that the man was a soccer fan, asked him to imagine playing that sport instead of tennis.)
Here's the "startling" part:
Doctors can also miss signs of consciousness in vegetative patients, according to the British and American studies. Ten months after Owen and his colleagues completed the tennis experiment with the vegetative woman, she was brought back to the imaging center and placed in an MRI machine. “We were absolutely dismayed, because we scanned her and there was nothing,” Owen recalled. The team tested the woman again the next day. This time, in response to a command to play tennis, her brain showed normal activity in the regions that mediate arm movements. Owen now repeats scans for each patient, conducting them twice a day for three days.
I don't recall the specific details about how many MRIs were run on Terri Schiavo; I seem to recall at least one, early in her illness.
But is it possible, just possible, that someone might have missed signs of consciousness in Terri? Given an objective analysis of those videos of Terri, I would have to conclude that such signs were almost certainly missed...or intentionally ignored. What might additional MRIs, or tests not even devised yet, have revealed about the level of her awareness? The videos show she was able to visually follow a moving object, smile, try to talk, and generate other responses; what else might science have revealed about her awareness, had science been applied to her case?
I have little doubt that rather than science, opinion and agenda were applied to Terri Schiavo's case. The agenda of euthanasia proponents? The agenda of someone who wanted to get an inconvenient wife out of the way? The agenda of those who also want the freedom to get inconvenient relatives out of the way? You'll have to be the judge of that. As for me, I think the evidence points strongly to the accurate conclusion.
The question for the future: will we face up to our agendas and the agendas of others and place the value of human life above them, or will we continue to avoid the truth and our own culpability in a travesty?
0 comments:
Post a Comment