It turns out that a neurologist hired by wife-killer Michael Schiavo to examine Terri, a doctor who approves of killing patients, had previously misdiagnosed a patient as being in a persistent vegetative state and declared that he would never again regain consciousness.
EXCERPTS:
”Sergeant Mack will never regain cognitive, sapient functioning,” Cranford said six months after Mack was shot while serving a search warrant on Dec. 13, 1979. ”He will never be aware of his condition nor resume any degree of meaningful voluntary conscious interaction with his family or friends.”
Based on Cranford’s unequivocal diagnosis of Mack, the officer’s relatives removed him from a respirator in August 1980 "because his family felt he should be allowed to die rather than exist in such a state," according to published reports.
But Mack did not die.
On Oct. 22, 1981, 18 months after Cranford declared Mack’s case hopeless, doctors at the advanced care facility where Mack was being treated noticed that he was awake.
(Cowboy hat tip to the reader who e-mailed!)
I’m uncomfortable with so much of the Terri Schiavo debate being about whether she was in PVS. What difference does that make to the question of starving her to death? Anyway, so one of the doctors made a misdiagnosis about this kind of condition 25 years ago? Golly, what professional would not like to revisit some cases he handled 25 years ago? Interesting, maybe, but again, we risk getting side-tracked if we spend much time on this.
Why am I not surrprised?
Besides, as Ed said so correctly, why does it matter whether she is in a PVS or not? Does she being in one okay Murder? Or is just Euthenasia okay?
And remember the Hippocratic Oath, Mr. Quack.
“Hello everybody”.
“Hi Dr. Nick”.
Well, I think the fact of this doctor’s mistake is important because it reminds us that medical knowledge is too sketchy to pronounce on such matters with confidence. A key part of the pro-death argument is trust in doctors’ judgments where they really have little competence. I agree with Mr. Peters that it’s not essential to the moral question of whether or not to starve someone to death.
Another example would be the pro-life strategy of showing how abortion is harmful to women. A good strategy, because it might cause people to think. It has no bearing on the essential moral question, of course, which is: is it okay to kill an unborn human?
I was originally from Minnesota and I remember this case as a child. Interesting that it was always in the back of my mind as Terri was slowly starved.
Ed,
I think the point is important to make for the same reason that it’s important to point out that in vitro fertilization kills excess embryos. The point here is not because if it weren’t for these problems everything would then be all right — it wouldn’t — but rather that even those who think that everything would otherwise be all right may more easily see that it isn’t in this light.
Protestants who don’t yet accept that in vitro fertilization is per se gravely wrong may yet concede that it is wrong because of its baby-killing methology, and in the same way relativists who don’t yet accept the wrongness of starving someone who will certainly never “wake up” may rethink their stance if it can be shown that doctors make mistakes about whether people will ever wake up.
Guys, I don’t think we should use ONLY our strongest arguments, eschewing the weaker. What good lawyer does that? What I said was that we need to be careful about letting the other side define what the key issues are in the first place, something we tend to fall into when we keep debating the lesser tangential points these folks keep putting on the table. It’s a judgment call; I’m confident our people are (now) are of the risks.