
Journal Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: Since the Register isn't exactly the best source 25
New Scientist story of the man with no brain, including MRI pictures. Compare this to Terry Schiavo's admittedly lower resolution CT scan. Note, in neither case is there a cerebral cortex left- it's been destroyed, Terry by injury, the unnamed French Bureaucrat by childhood illness. But even with the lower resolution, Terry had more brain left than the bureaucrat.
He functions (Score:2)
Wave activity is obviously as important as the relative mass.
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The point is that Terry's life was cut off *before* she was given a chance to recover- merely because a certain segment of our society (not just her husband, though of course his opinion was the deciding factor) didn't think it was possible for *ANYBODY* with a missing cortex to recover. OBVIOUSLY the case of the French Bureaucrat
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Healthy, in the case of neural tissue, means alive. Dead tissue decomposes into cerebrospinal fluid; that's how they tell the difference on the MRI.
The Frenchman's brain was pushed aside, but the tissue that was there was healthy.
No, that's not what the MRI shows. It doesn't show just "pushed aside", it shows a large portion that was outright killed, including the prefrontal cortex that should *NOT* have let him be anything other than the v
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She was in a persistent vegetative state for many many years. The two cases are TOTALLY different. Your leap of logic not withstanding, just because one person in 6 billion recovers from a traumatic brain injury, it doesn't follow that EVERY TBI can be recovered from. Her's clearly could not. The only people who argue otherwise are fundies, and other people CLEARLY not connected with reality.
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There are loads of cases out there of a "persistent vegetative state" being recovered from after decades of recuper
Your logic is flawed. In fact, it's not logic. (Score:2)
The vast majority of which do not include a brain that has atrophied to the size of a large lemon. His is the only one I'm familiar with in the literature where there was any sort of recovery at all with that much damage. Please feel free to find, and provide references to all the other examples that you seem to think are there of people recovering from this.
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The original Register article had blog entries that pointed to a second in England. But more importantly to Terry's case is the incidence of stroke
Pictures lie (Score:2)
You also need to let the family decide what treatment is best.
The bottom li
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So you make the theory based only on gut feeling, and if the test support
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That's probably true. I guess I just don't like people lying about evidence in the end- I
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Again, I really, really, really, really don't want to get into the appropriate use of diagnostic tools here, but I should clarify that statement. I made that statement from the standpoint of, you as a lay person are not qualified to read those films, and as such, they 'lie' to you. You see two similar appearing scans (and, you're not even really seeing them, you're seeing crappy reproduction of a scan on a computer) and you go "Yup! Those look similar to me!"
There are basically two issues here:
#1: You
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Someday the scans will be replaced with an atom by atom placement- and the computer readout will be the diagnostic. Not today, ye
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* Science isn't the be all end all. There will always, always, always be an 'Art' to Medicine. This is why it's called a 'practice'.
* It's not making Logical Leaps - it's making a qualified diagnosis. To call it a 'Leap' is very insulting to all the good clinicians out there who are a giant metric fuckload better at this than either of us.
* It's not somethin
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Given that, I can't have peace with this- from either side. "Terry wasn't ever going to wake up" is a prediction based on incomplete data. "Terry could recover" is a statement based on faith. NEITHER carry the weight of scientific evidence. Neither sid
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I think if you were to get a LOT deeper into Medicine, you'd come to the same conclusion that I have, which is that the Dr's were a LOT closer to the truth than the fundies.
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The difference, of course, being that if the doctors are wrong, you've got murder....where if fundies are wrong, you get a wasted bed space a few million dollars of pallative care. I come up against the fundies in a similar way on the subject of the Death Penalty- I'd rather spend a couple of million keeping a potentially innocent man
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Holy Cow (Score:2)
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