File this one under “Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show.”
Let’s deal with the medicine part first and the Frankenstein part second.
On the medical front, good news! Researchers have found a way to communicate with patients who are in a “persistent vegetative state.”
Turns out that they, or some of them, ain’t so vegetable-like after all!
Here’s how it works: Hook the “vegetable” up to an MRI machine and ask the
person to think about playing tennis. Note what areas of the brain light up.
Then ask the person to think about walking through their house. Note what areas light up then.
Then say, “I’d like to ask you some questions. If you want to answer ‘yes,’ think about playing tennis. If you want to answer ‘no,’ think about walking through their house. Do you understand?”
If the tennis-playing areas light up, go ahead and ask your questions. If the house-walking areas light up, explain again. (Or assume that the person is really smart and having a joke on you by thinking “no” when really he does understand.)
This really works!
At least with some patients. (Not with others, unfortunately.)
What it shows, though, is that these patients aren’t “vegetative” at all—at least mentally. They’re able to process and respond meaningfully to questions based on thinking about remembered/imagined actions.
That shows advanced cognitive functions! Remember: The person isn’t just thinking about saying “yes” or “no.” The person is thinking about other actions as a way of saying “yes” and “no.” That shows sophisticated mental processes in action!
So! Good news for the pro-life side, right?
Yesssss . . . but . . . here’s where Dr. Frankenstein—or at least Dr. Kevorkian—comes into the picture.
Already people are talking about using this technology to ask PVS patients questions like “Are you in pain?” and “Do you want to die?”
The first question is entirely legitimate! If someone’s in pain, let’s do what we can to alleviate it! By all means!
But let’s not proceed so quickly to the “Do you want to die?” question.
Other questions would be good ones, like “Do you need to change positions?”, “Are you hungry or thirsty?”, or “Would you like me to get a nurse?” or—once the immediate pain is dealt with—“Would you like me to get a priest to come pray with you and give you the sacraments?”, “May I squeeze your hand to show that I care about you?” (or even just do this one and don’t ask!), “Would you like me to turn the TV on?”, “Would you like to listen to some music?”, “How about an audio book? I could get you a subscription to Audible.com.” Or even, “Let’s use ‘yes’/‘no’ with the alphabet so you can tell me what you want. Think about what you’d most like, and we’ll spell it out.”
There are all kinds of compassionate alternatives to “Do you want to die?”
But folks are already noting that the new technique may put more pressure on people suffering from PVS to just go ahead and die.
So what can—and by rights should—be a vindication for pro-lifers may get twisted into a new way to promote euthanasia.
Hence: Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show. . . . turning legitimate medicine to the service of evil.
Watch this one, folks. It’s going to be a BIG one as brain scanning technology becomes more common and more robust—allowing easier, richer communication with people in this state. It’ll be a major new feature of the discussion.
The work “changes everything”, says Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, who is carrying out similar work on patients with consciousness disorders. “Knowing that someone could persist in a state like this and not show evidence of the fact that they can answer yes/no questions should be extremely disturbing to our clinical practice.”
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A comment posted at New Scientist (“Fri Feb 05 18:17:54 GMT 2010 by TheSimulacra”) seems to be saying that the article is actually not about people in the “vegetative state” (persistent or otherwise) or about people with “brain death”, but about people in a rare and different condition called “Locked-In Syndrome”. If so, then researchers have NOT “found a way to communicate with patients who are in a ‘persistent vegetative state’”. Rather, they’ve found a way to communicate with persons with “Locked-In Syndrome” (or some other condition). Indeed, to the extent that, by definition, “vegetative state” would necessarily mean that there is in fact an absence of awareness (i.e. “wakefulness without awareness”), there will never be any study showing that persons (truly) in a “vegetative state” have awareness. But there may be cases of misdiagnosis, such as due to faulty diagnostic criteria. As you said in your article, Jimmy, “What it shows… is that these patients aren’t ‘vegetative’ at all—at least mentally.”
If I read things right, TheSimulacra is saying that Locked-In Syndrome was featured on the TV show House and that this is a different condition than PVS. He’s not saying that the study dealt with Locked-In. He’s saying that the TV show did. LINK
In that light, I only commented on what TheSimulacra’s post said (to me) and not necessarily what he was (intending) to say. My point being that based on the definition he posted of “vegetative state”, the article is not about people in the “vegetative state” (persistent or otherwise). Indeed, the study author himself says, “We don’t know what to call this; he just doesn’t fit a definition.” If so, then it’s not “vegetative state” or “permanent vegetative state”, because it doesn’t fit. As I also mentioned earlier, the vegetative state (medically speaking) is generally defined as involving an absence of awareness. Therefore, if these people are aware, then in fact (definitionally) they’re not in a vegetative state (at least not while they’re aware), and the study doesn’t (nor can it) confirm that they ever truly were in a vegetative state. So what to call it? Perhaps Locked-In Syndrome (or as I said, some other condition) may be more fitting. There is reportedly a rare subtype (not mentioned in TheSimulacra’s post) of the already rare Locked-In Syndrome called Total Locked-In Syndrome in which the person has no apparent control even over eye movements. One can’t exactly tell from the published study as it presents only minimal information about the patients. What it does say is that in half the cases where MRI data showed evidence of awareness, subsequent bedside behavioral assessment did also find some behavioral indicators of awareness that hadn’t been noticed previously. Perhaps the assessment team simply looked harder in light of the MRI findings.
Such a wasted opportunity to show true compassion to the suffering!
Just as amnio was supposed to save lives and turned out to be the means of conducting “search-and-destroy missions on unborn babies with Down syndrome, now a breakthrough which could make the lives of people suffering from PVS much more comfortable, will only lead to efforts to euthanize them.
Valiant Catholics are needed to keep this nations’ healthcare from resembling Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory.
Human beings are not carrots or fig leaves. The use of
vegetative” is an attempt to demean the person, who may then be discarded.
I find the second patient’s brain scan particularly interesting because of the comparison to Terri Schiavo. Some have argued that because so much of her brain was empty space (or “liquified”), there was no way she had any consciousness. But this picture shows a person with a tremendous amount of empty space where brain tissue should be and yet this individual was responding according to the brain scan.
Thanks for posting this piece.
I mentioned this study to someone and they immediately said that they would want to be killed off. I found this horrifying and saw the implications of this right away.
Seems to me it would be easy for someone to “interpret” the scans to mean “He says he’d like to die now” regardless of what the patient is actually thinking. (Hey, maybe he’s just daydreaming about tennis!)
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