Comments on: fMRI, Consciousness, and Vegetative States http://blogs.law.stanford.edu/lawandbiosciences/2010/02/06/fmri-consciousness-and-vegetative-states/ Thu, 09 May 2013 20:20:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Chris Borthwick http://blogs.law.stanford.edu/lawandbiosciences/2010/02/06/fmri-consciousness-and-vegetative-states/comment-page-1/#comment-338 Chris Borthwick Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:28:37 +0000 http://blogs.law.stanford.edu/lawandbiosciences/2010/02/06/fmri-consciousness-and-vegetative-states/#comment-338 So why are people surprised? PVS was always a dodgy business, and since Andrews et al 1996 (K. Andrews, L. Murphy, R. Munday, C. Littlewood, C. Misdiagnosis of the vegetative state: retrospective study in a rehabilitation unit. BMJ 313 (1996) 13-16; found that 75% of the patients in that study who had been diagnosed as being in PVS were eventually able to communicate) should from a scientific standpoint have been discarded altogether. In practice, of course, it makes us uncomfortable to believe people are suffering and we adopt schemas and diagnoses that obscure this. For a fuller account, see my article (Borthwick CJ, Crossley R., Permanent vegetative state: usefulness and limits of a prognostic definition. NeuroRehabilitation. 2004;19(4):381-9), online at http://home.vicnet.net.au/~borth/Neurorehabpvs.html. So why are people surprised? PVS was always a dodgy business, and since Andrews et al 1996 (K. Andrews, L. Murphy, R. Munday, C. Littlewood, C. Misdiagnosis of the vegetative state: retrospective study in a rehabilitation unit. BMJ 313 (1996) 13-16; found that 75% of the patients in that study who had been diagnosed as being in PVS were eventually able to communicate) should from a scientific standpoint have been discarded altogether. In practice, of course, it makes us uncomfortable to believe people are suffering and we adopt schemas and diagnoses that obscure this.
For a fuller account, see my article (Borthwick CJ, Crossley R., Permanent vegetative state: usefulness and limits of a prognostic definition. NeuroRehabilitation. 2004;19(4):381-9), online at http://home.vicnet.net.au/~borth/Neurorehabpvs.html.

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