It must be terrible getting through each day. If I had a nickel for everytime you have said that something you read has made you sick, I could finance a nice world cruise. Based on your blog comments, you apparently stay constantly ill. What happened to that Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy, deep in your heart?

I'm not sure why Dr. Dean would need to answer for anything in the Terry Schiavo case. One of the ironies of that entire fiasco is that the courts only followed Florida Law. A Bi-partisan law at that. The Terri Schiavo law was overturned because the Florida Legislature and the Florida Governor attempted to selectively administer their own laws.

As far as this article, I'll be glad to make a comment on what it means. This does not even rise to the level of single research study, and a single study is never the final answer on anything. This is only a single patient. All it does is provides some insight for further research to possibly develope a diagnoistic tool. That is all.

Second, we already know that if we had such a diagnostic tool available to use on Ms. Schiavo that it would not have shown cognitive brain activity. We don't need a non-invasive diagnostic tool to tell us about Ms. Schiavo's condition. She has been autopsied and those findings are as definitive as you can get. Show me a physician anywhere who will argue based on the autopsy results that Terri Schiavo could have recovered or was aware of what was going on and I'll show you a quack.

I know what Dr. Dean wouldn't do. He wouldn't make a biased and wrong pronouncement on the supposed awareness of a person he had never examined based upon a three minute, heavily edited video shot by people with a political agenda that matched his own. Like Dr. Frist did.

It's horrifying. If we're wrong about what it means to be in a veg. state, we're in for an expensive, morally ambiguous mess. But Keith is right, one patient's results don't mean much of anything.

So far as Terri Schaivo, wasn't her brain so badly damaged that it couldn't have been responsive in the way described in the article?

Wow, Aaron really got a rise out of the usual suspects here.

I have no medical expertise, although I can effectively unwrap a band-aid, but I was struck by the legal issues in the case at the time.

The Terri Schiavo case was essentially a contracts and testate case. As such, there was no jury (a bench trial). This is important, because judges make findings of law, and juries make findings of fact, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, findings of fact CANNOT be appealed. So when a judge holds a bench trial, the judge is also the finder of fact, and it becomes extraordinarily difficult to appeal the ruling. And when the ruling is in an area of law like contracts and testate which has fairly straightforward legal rules and turns entirely on questions of fact as presented by the evidence...well, the judge gets a position of power with virtually no checks. It is a unique blip in the judicial world, but ti exists.

Constitutional protections exist to protect someone from having a bench trial over a felony, although as anyone who has been to traffic court knows, bench trials can be used for misdemeanors.

Now, since the Terri Schiavo case was about the death of a human being, and a particularly inhumane death at that, one woudl expect that a jury should be required for findings of fact. But it was not, because this was not the state per se trying to kill Terri Schiavo, it was an adjudication of an alleged conversation with her husband.

I have often wondered if so much of the dispute over the case would have happened if the issue would have been decided by a jury. People tend to accept decisions reached by a group more than decisions reached by an individual. I can't remember right now, but I believe someone in the FLorida Assembly was pushing for legislation requiring a jury or a partial jury in such cases.