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Offline Karlos

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Re: crunch time
« on: March 28, 2005, 12:29:46 AM »
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JaXanim wrote:
Well she doen't look 'brain dead' to me! Who says her brain is 'mush'? What sort of diagnosis is that?  Yours presumably. When I saw her on tv over the last couple of weeks, She clearly recognised her mother/father and had a significant capacity to communicate using her eyes. She also moves her head and seems to follow what's happening around her. This woman isn't brain dead and she is not in a PVS (in my opinion).


I'm sorry, but the_leander is correct as far as it is possible to be. That she is in a PVS is not his diagnosis, its the neurologists that have studied her. That her brain is not functional and so much dead tissue is not his diagnosis, its again the neurologists that have studied her.

Your description of her cognitive ability is completely subjective. We have seen only a tiny amount of footage. Even then, my opinion on what I have seen in that footage is different from yours. Absolutely nothing in the footage I saw suggested she was remotely cognitive.

Of course, this is a deeply sensetive issue. There rarely is any agreement where emotion is in conflict with rationality.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: crunch time
« Reply #1 on: March 28, 2005, 01:45:43 PM »
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T_Bone wrote:
@karlos
"Of course, this is a deeply sensetive issue. There rarely is any agreement where emotion is in conflict with rationality."

Even rationally I don't like it.


I don't like it either. The entire legal case stinks, turning the unfortunate victim of a tragic, irrecoverable injury into a legal/media circus. Any shred of dignity she may have had left has been completely leeched away.

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She's going to die, it's inevitable, and she's probably not going to know one way or the other, but the precident this sets is just bad.


Looking at it rationally (and this might sound a bit cold, so apologies there), this lady is already dead. She has been dead for over a decade.

Death does not mean the cessation of all biological function. Indeed, when you die the cells in your body continue to function for some considerable time (depending on their tolerance to oxygen deprevation). Ultimately death is the cessation of all coordinated metabolic function - the processes that seperate you from an equivalent mass of slowly dying individual living cells.

We can prolong the life of any tissue artificially by ensuring it receives nutrition and oxygen, but nobody would consider a person as being alive because their heart, donated for transplant, was now beating in someone elses chest cavity.

In this case, the basic biological functions of an entire human body are being sustained artificially. However, the single most critical function that seperates her as a person from her as a mass of living tissue has already been lost.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: crunch time
« Reply #2 on: March 30, 2005, 11:35:22 AM »
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There's a good reason I did that, I don't quite recall what it was, but it made sense at the time.


...
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Offline Karlos

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Re: crunch time
« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2005, 02:56:03 PM »
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T_Bone wrote:

Once the vultures show up, you know the issue is dead.
(heh, wonder what took him so long, wonder if he was perched on a cactus somewhere waiting for the republicans to leave)


?
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Offline Karlos

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Re: crunch time
« Reply #4 on: March 30, 2005, 07:25:23 PM »
@Wilse

Ah, I see. I was confused as T_Bone had quoted me then said it.
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