Only Sometimes It Isn’t
What do you say when the doctors proclaim someone is in a "persistent vegetative state"? Pull the plug? Give up and walk away? Just forget the patient and move on?
What if the patient then suddenly wakes up and talks?
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - A woman who went into a vegetative state in November of 2000 awoke this week for three days, spoke with her family and a local television station before slipping back on Wednesday. "I'm fine," Christa Lilly told her mother on Sunday — her first words in eight months. She has awakened four other times for briefer periods.
"I think it's wonderful. It makes me so happy," Lilly told television station KKTV-TV. She also got to see youngest daughter, Chelcey, now 12 years old, and three grandchildren.
Her neurologist, Dr. Randall Bjork, said he couldn't explain how or why she awoke.
"I'm just not able to explain this on the basis of what we know about persistent vegetative states," he said.
The sad fact here is that the "authoritative pronouncements" of the doctors need to be carefully judged by the people involved. A lot of what they say is based on a consensus of opinion. Sometimes, those consensus decisions are not, in fact, correct. How many times in my lifetime alone I have seen things which were adamantly proclaimed to be the absolute TRUTH™ turn out later to be completely wrong, I can't even count. This happens rather often in the medical field although the doctors don't actually like to announce their sudden reversals. (The treatment of stomach ulcers for many years would be a rather good example. It turns out that most of what the doctors strongly recommended was either useless or harmful. Or both.) It happens in the hard sciences, too. There were physicists who went to their graves believing Einstein was completely wrong for having overturned all the consensus opinions from generations of physics thought and belief.
There is much we do not understand. And sometimes the doctors make a pronouncement that is exactly correct. Only it might not be.
By Joanie, Wednesday, 7 March , 2007 @ 10:54 pm
For more interesting medical misunderstandings, read “The Ghost Map” by Steven Johnson. It’s about the cholera epidemic in the 1800’s in London. The ‘miasmists’ were quite certain that cholera and other diseases were caused by a ‘miasma’ or airborne phenomenon. So they proceeded to legislate removal of the cess pools (which were stinky, so therefore must have caused disease) and dump all waste into the Thames. Which, of course, people drank from. As the water-borne diseases ravaged the population, the scientists and politicians were proudly legislating exactly the worst remedy.
A fascinating subject, in retrospect. But what a terrible time to be caught up in the epidemic.
Joanie
By syn, Thursday, 8 March , 2007 @ 5:51 am
“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it” Vaclav Havel