BeeZarre

Always be suspicious of someone who makes very detailed claims of fact with no citations, and then becomes huffy when asked to provide them.

Brandon9000 wrote:

As a person making detailed medical claims about her condition, it is your responsibility, not mine, to support what you said. Are you unable to?

by your own admission you NEED to do your own research. my description of her current condition is as basic as one can get. it is by no means a detailed description.

brandon9000 wrote:

Why did you cut off most of my actual statement? Good way to win arguments.

the excess semantics you provided are of no correlation to the very real fact ' she is not dying ' is NOT interchangeable with ' she is perfectly healthy '.

Many people would agree that a disease-free disabled person can be called healthy.

Quote:

A health proxy has no authority whatever except to interpret the patient's wishes. At least that is true in NY. If you have evidence to the contrary for Florida, cite it.

again, by your own admission you NEED to do your own research.

Quote:

You know as well as I do that I was responding to this statement of yours:

wenchilina wrote:

...makes me wonder about your capacity for understanding basic science...

And as previously stated physics is not neurology.

Thus far we've determined you're unfamiliar with her actual condition, the lengths her husband went to when trying to revive some function of the mind and FL law. yet somehow you feel you have the authority to challenge others opinions on the matters. riiiiiiiiight.

Brandon9000 wrote:

Translation: You cannot back up what you have stated.

translation : having a grasp on the details of this case to make a reasonable assertion on the matter generally makes for a sound argument versus tossing out ignorant uneducated claims to debunk others opinions.

Brandon9000 wrote:

Always be suspicious of someone who makes very detailed claims of fact with no citations, and then becomes huffy when asked to provide them.

by all means, feel free to dispute the apparent myths of the function of the cerebral cortex and more specifically in the case of terri. you dont even need to ' cite sources ' for me to debunk them

Brandon, I have said several times -- and as far as I know, have been ignored each time -- that she is in a persistent vegetative state, and in one post included a quote as to what that means and another quote about the thousands of times a year the decision to remove the feeding tube from people in the same situation has been made by loved ones, including times when loved ones have disagreed with each other.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1231310#1231310

So while I won't presume to speak for Wenchilina, I have already made a similar statement and backed it up -- but that didn't seem to be enough for you.

A persistent vegetative state is something different, "sort of like being in an awake coma," said Dr. David A. Goldstein of the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. The patients' eyes are open, they have sleep-wake cycles, and it often appears that they are interacting with visitors, which makes it very hard on families.

The brain of such patients is functioning only at a very rudimentary level, said Dr. Kenneth V. Iserson of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center in Tucson. They cannot feel pain, express themselves or receive communication.

They may even have grimaces or smiles or other facial movements that look like they are reflecting emotions, but "there really isn't a significant relationship with the outside world," Goldstein said.

And the longer the state persists, "the less likely they are to come out of it," Keane added. Schiavo has been in this condition for 15 years, "and it is very, very unlikely she would wake up," he added.

A persistent vegetative state, which sometimes follows a coma, refers to a condition in which individuals have lost cognitive neurological function and awareness of the environment but retain noncognitive function and a perserved sleep-wake cycle.

It is sometimes described as when a person is technically alive, but his/her brain is dead. However, that description is not completely accurate. In persistent vegetative state the individual loses the higher cerebral powers of the brain, but the functions of the brainstem, such as respiration (breathing) and circulation, remain relatively intact. Spontaneous movements may occur and the eyes may open in response to external stimuli, but the patient does not speak or obey commands. Patients in a vegetative state may appear somewhat normal. They may occasionally grimace, cry, or laugh.

brandon

you're welcome to maintain long winded diatribes about ' sources ' to detract from the fact you cannot dispute very real FACTS of the case - to detract from the fact you're as previously stated obviously completely unfamiliar with the details of the case itself both medically and legally. however, why not use the time you've spent regurgitating irrelevant sermons on ' sources ' and actually do some research on the medical and legal aspects of the case.

go ahead, dispute my claims.

Judge Greer accepted the testimony of doctors who said Ms. Schiavo, 41, is in a "persistent vegetative state," meaning damage to her cerebral cortex has made her incapable of emotion, memory or thought.

...I will go back to my original quote on this (and I'd still like your reasoning on why this point was repeatedly ignored by you while you saw fit to berate Wenchilina at length for doing what I did right away):

Quote:

Judge Greer accepted the testimony of doctors who said Ms. Schiavo, 41, is in a "persistent vegetative state," meaning damage to her cerebral cortex has made her incapable of emotion, memory or thought.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/18/national/18schiavo.html

Unlike you, she has steadfastly refused to provide citations for any of her assertions, no matter how many times requested to do so, and what that means is pretty clear.

Judge Greer to the contrary, there have been numerous claims by people involved in this case that TS is, in fact, quite reactive to her environment and the people around her.

TS is, in fact, quite reactive to her environment and the people around her

I welcome goverment interference in private life when the issue is whether to kill someone or not. Seems appropriate and reasonable.

In all fairness to the Repubs, the dems were absolutely as malfescent in their neglect of opposition to this horrid attempt by the repubs.
The actions on both sides of the aisle sicken me.

It may seem coldhearted to bring up money -- but money is already the elephant in the room. Estimates have placed Schiavo's care as high as $500,000 a year since she collapsed 13 years ago. And she is no anomaly. A 1995 study estimated that 16,000 to 35,000 Americans are in a persistent vegetative state, meaning they have been comatose with severe brain damage for more than a year. The cost of their care, which can vary widely, adds up to $1 billion to $7 billion in any given year. "The hidden issue in all of this is how much our society can afford to indulge this desire to keep people alive no matter what the cost," says Dr. Stuart J. Youngner, chairman of the Bioethics Dept. at Case Western Reserve University.

Granted, the price of caring for the permanently comatose isn't much in the context of the $1.4 trillion the U.S. will spend on health care this year. But the U.S. cannot afford to pay for every medical need, and the Schiavo case offers the opportunity to open a public dialogue about a concept that has been taboo for too long: rationing health care.

Medical ethicists and health-care experts have argued for years that rationing should be part of the national conversation. "We've tried to sweep it under the rug," says Alan Meisel, a bioethicist at the University of Pittsburgh. "We don't have unlimited resources, and we ought to be thinking about where they can do the most good." For a start, we could admit that health care in the U.S. is already rationed -- albeit very arbitrarily. The 43 million uninsured, with their limited access to health care, present the most obvious example.

Where does the U.S. health-care system bestow its bounty? Spending is heavily skewed toward acute care for the sickest, particularly the elderly. In a study published last year, the mean medical expenditure for senior citizens was $37,581 in the final year of life, vs. $7,365 for other years. Medicare spends 27% of its budget on patients in their last year -- and those funds serve only 5% of enrollees. This is far different from most European systems, where expensive treatments are routinely denied when the outcome is likely to be grim. In Belgium, for example, the final year accounts for less than 13% of the health-care budget.

U.S. clinicians tend to favor heroic interventions. One survey of 600 critical-care doctors found that the cost-benefit ratio of a given procedure was among the least important factors when making care decisions. More than 40% said patients in a vegetative state should be admitted to intensive care if they face a life-threatening event.

This approach may fly in the face of what the public wants. Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, chairman of the Clinical Bioethics Dept. at the National Institutes of Health, notes that almost every surveyed tallied has found that 80% of the respondents say that they would not want to be kept alive in a vegetative state. Perhaps there's a message here.