Saturday, May 27, 2006

Are we not men? We are .... persistent vegetables


May 23, 2006
Joseph Bottum writes:
An amazing story in the Guardian today: Patients who were unconscious for years, diagnosed as being in “persistent vegetative states” came awake when they were given a new experimental medication. As Wesley J. Smith emails to note, “They interacted with their environment. And then, after four hours, became unconscious again. The story says ‘permanently unconscious,’ but I doubt that phrase applies any more.” It illustrates that “we really don’t know what is going on inside the minds of people diagnosed as permanently unconscious,” and it should cause great hesitation before pulling the tube by which people are fed. The doctors involved also claimed that the drug could have wider application, hoping that “the drug could have uses in all kinds of brain damage, including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.”

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