Interesting how this is all coming to the fore again.
Today, in the Boston Globe, there was an article on a woman who can't let her mother go, even though the mother has been on a respirator for years. The hospital is pushing for the plug to be pulled (usually it's the other way around) - but of course a part of that is because Blue Cross has ruled that the patient is getting palliative care and not treatment, hence Blue Cross won't pay. See:
Boston Globe - right to die article.
And, I also read today's New York Times, which talks about a patient who everyone expected to be brain dead but who apparently has some function (ashown on an MRI). See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/magazine/28VEGETAT.html Quote:One morning just over a year after his accident, Rios was taken to the Sloan Kettering Institute on Manhattan's East Side. There, in a dim room, a group of researchers placed a mask over his eyes, fixed headphones over his ears and guided his head into the bore of an M.R.I. machine. A 40-second loop of a recording made by Rios's sister Maria played through the headphones: she told him that she was there with him, that she loved him. As the sound entered his ears, the M.R.I. machine scanned his brain, mapping changes in activity. Several hours afterward, two researchers, Nicholas D. Schiff and Joy Hirsch, took a look at the images from the scan. They hadn't been sure what to expect -- Rios was among the first people in his condition to have his brain activity measured in this way -- but they certainly weren't expecting what they saw. ''We just stared at these images,'' recalls Schiff, an expert in consciousness disorders at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. ''There didn't seem to be anything missing.''
As the tape of his sister's voice played, several distinct clusters of neurons in Rios's brain had fired in a manner virtually identical to that of a healthy subject.
There's no easy answers when it comes to this. I hope there is another national debate about it, like there was in the '70s with Karen Ann Quinlan. And, in all fairness, I think there's something to be said about wrapping such a discussion up with the right to die. I think the two are related - one is the right to die as expressed by a conscious person at the time and the other is the right to die as expressed by an unconscious person but earlier expressed to their caregiver or health care proxy, and as carried out by the health care proxy.
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