‘Stop dehydration
deaths,’ says Terri Schiavo’s brother in response to new brain scan
Reacting to news of a breakthrough in brain scanning technology, Terri
Schiavo's brother Bobby Schindler is calling for a halt to removing
hydration from brain-damaged patients who are thought to be in a
persistent vegetative state.
An “unscientific, inaccurate” diagnosis of unresponsive patients is
being used as “a criterion to kill,” Schindler charged.
Schindler was responding to news that researchers from the Medical
Research Council (MRC) and the University of Liège have used a
technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map a
patient’s brain activity while he was asked to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’
questions.
One patient, a 29-year-old man who suffered a severe traumatic brain
injury in a traffic accident, was able to communicate by willfully
changing his brain activity, a press release from the MRC reports. He
correctly answered questions such as “Is your father’s name Alexander?”
Dr. Adrian Owen and his team at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences
Unit in Cambridge, England were the developers of the technique.
“We were astonished when we saw the results of the patient’s scan and
that he was able to correctly answer the questions that were asked by
simply changing his thoughts,” Dr. Owen commented. “Not only did these
scans tell us that the patient was not in a vegetative state but, more
importantly, for the first time in five years, it provided the patient
with a way of communicating his thoughts to the outside world.”
Dr. Steven Laureys of the University of Liège, a co-author of
the
study, said the scans were the only viable method for the patient to
communicate since his accident.
“It’s early days, but in the future we hope to develop this technique
to allow some patients to express their feelings and thoughts, control
their environment and increase their quality of life.”
The three-year study conducted fMRI scans on 23 patients diagnosed as
being in a vegetative state. The technology detected signs of awareness
in four of the cases, 17 percent of the participants.
The fMRI technique can decipher the brain’s answers to questions in
healthy participants with 100 percent accuracy but has previously not
been used for a patient who cannot move or speak.
Dr. Martin Monti, another MRC co-author of the study, said the advance
could help with clinical questions and would allow patients to say if
they are feeling any pain.
The new study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Allan Ropper, a neurologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in
Boston, wrote an editorial accompanying the study. According to
HealthDay News, he said that people are going to have to “grapple” with
the meaning of brain scans that show consciousness or residual
consciousness.
“It has to do with what you think life is and what is a meaningful
life. Those are social, cultural and theological questions,” he said.
He also cautioned against giving false hope to families, noting the
small percentage of the responsive patients. All the study’s patients
had suffered traumatic brain injuries, not damage from oxygen
deprivation.
Speaking of the 29-year-old patient, Monti said “it is still the case
that we managed to give him, to a little extent, a voice. In a sense
there was a very positive outcome. We managed to interact. This is an
extremely exciting thing."
CNA sought comment on the issue from Bobby Schindler of the Terri
Schiavo Foundation.
His sister Terri, who was severely brain damaged from oxygen
deprivation, was at the center of a 2005 legal dispute in Florida. She
was denied nutrition and hydration by court order in a case between her
blood relatives and her husband.
Schindler said the study backs other findings about the “unscientific,
inaccurate” diagnosis of a persistent vegetative state (PVS) and shows
how it is “often” wrong when diagnosing people with severe injuries.
“As in the case of my sister, they’re using this diagnosis as a
criterion to kill.”
Schindler said his family had asked a judge for similar testing for
Terri but it was denied.
If the technique was easy to conduct and available, he said, it would
have given a better understanding of her condition. “Why not ask,
especially when it is going to end someone’s life?”
Asked whether the case offers insight into how unresponsive patients
should be treated, he replied:
“Nobody should have to earn the right to hydration. We should do
everything we can to care for these people, regardless of how
responsive or unresponsive they are.”
Schindler lamented that people are being “indoctrinated” to see killing
as “an act of compassion.”
“We are morally obligated to care for these people,” Schindler told CNA.
“They should stop any further dehydration deaths, because we’re
learning how inaccurate the PVS diagnosis is.”
Discussing the other patients who could not communicate, he said
families of unresponsive patients should continue to treat them with
“love and compassion.”
But the patient’s condition should never justify removing food,
hydration or “basic care,” he stressed.
Schindler also noted that improvements on science are possible and
could improve unresponsive patients’ functioning.
“We should never come to the conclusion that someone is better off
starving to death,” he told CNA.
He was critical of news reports that claimed the new technology would
not have helped Terri Schiavo, saying some stories were written “as if
these doctors want to go out of their way to justify Terri’s death.”
“If you read these articles, it seems they always have this caveat:
‘let’s not jump to conclusions with Terri Schiavo and say these tests
would have proven she wasn’t in the conditions the doctors said she was
in.’”
Schindler told CNA that more doctors were on record saying that Terri
could have been helped with some of the technology available. They
believed that she wasn’t in a vegetative state.
He also advocated the elimination of the term “vegetative state” from
common use, saying it is “dehumanizing” and devalues the person and his
or her “inherent moral worth.” In his view, PVS diagnosis should also
not be used as a criterion for ending someone’s life because of how
often it is wrong.
Schindler said he describes unresponsive patients as “persons with
brain injuries.”
“I don’t know why I have to label them as being a vegetable. I think it
leads to an existing prejudice against these types of people,” he told
CNA.
Source:
CNA
Publish
Date:
February 4, 2010
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