Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: Since the Register isn't exactly the best source

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

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

She didn't.

Wave activity is obviously as important as the relative mass.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

He didn't *always* function- it took a good deal of time to retrain what was left of his brain to do the tasks the missing part could no longer do. Decades of training, slowly.

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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[Shadow Wrought]

You're assuming that the remainder of the tissue is healthy. The Frenchman's brain was pushed aside, but the tissue that was there was healthy. I don't know, because of the extant of the damage, that you can argue that what was left of Terry Schiavo's brain was equally undamged. Mere brain mass isn't enough- as the Frenchman also proves.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

You're assuming that the remainder of the tissue is healthy.

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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[Scott Lockwood]

Bull.

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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[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

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.

[Scott Lockwood]

There are loads of cases out there of a "persistent vegetative state" being recovered from after decades of recuperation.

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.

The reason her TBI was conside

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

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

[Scott Lockwood]

See subject. I don't ever trust imaging alone for a diagnosis. As a lab tech, I may be a little more familiar with best practices than you, or maybe you already know this, BUT: You NEVER use a test to make a diagnosis. You make a diagnosis, and then use testing to confirm your diagnosis. If the tests come back NOT in support of your diagnosis, you make a new diagnosis, and perform additional testing to confirm or deny your diagnosis.

You also need to let the family decide what treatment is best.

The bottom li

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

See subject. I don't ever trust imaging alone for a diagnosis. As a lab tech, I may be a little more familiar with best practices than you, or maybe you already know this, BUT: You NEVER use a test to make a diagnosis. You make a diagnosis, and then use testing to confirm your diagnosis. If the tests come back NOT in support of your diagnosis, you make a new diagnosis, and perform additional testing to confirm or deny your diagnosis.

So you make the theory based only on gut feeling, and if the test support

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[Scott Lockwood]

Your understanding of the diagnostic process is flawed at best. Your reliance on imaging technology is also bad, your trust is misplaced. More than that, you'd need to go to school for a long, long time to understand. I don't want to get into it, because I think you are so emotionally entrenched in your position, that you are very unlikely to see reason. So, perhaps it's best if we just agree to disagree about that. :-)

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

Your understanding of the diagnostic process is flawed at best. Your reliance on imaging technology is also bad, your trust is misplaced. More than that, you'd need to go to school for a long, long time to understand. I don't want to get into it, because I think you are so emotionally entrenched in your position, that you are very unlikely to see reason. So, perhaps it's best if we just agree to disagree about that.

That's probably true. I guess I just don't like people lying about evidence in the end- I

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[Scott Lockwood]

arrgh.

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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[Marxist Hacker 42]

Thank you. In that case, the argument presented to me during the origninal Terry Schaivo debate was a lie- the CT scan had NOTHING to do with it and the diagnosis was just a best guess based on previous observation. I can live with that. It's too bad doctors don't have to be as careful about not predicting the future as engineers do- but that's the nature of the game I guess.

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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[Scott Lockwood]

They have that - positron emission tomography, or P.E.T. scans. Still, you can't expect to 'take a picture' and have it provide a diagnosis. Even if we could get a pet scan of the whole body, in real time, that you could pan and scan through, it would take a qualified diagnostician to make it make sense. That's just not going to work.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

Isn't it just like any other form of deep and narrow knowledge- subject to a good expert system analysis? Or is it simply not based in science alone, requiring the instinct and ability to make logical leaps of faith of a human brain?

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[Scott Lockwood]

Dude. I can tell you don't want to let it go. To a degree, I respect that. However, you need to step back, take a deep breath, and realize a few things:

* 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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[Marxist Hacker 42]

I think I'll just let it go, with one statement- there is no certainty in art or religion. Only science can offer certainty. And only if your diagnosis is based on available, objective data can it be considered to be true enough to base a human life on.

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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[Scott Lockwood]

Then your 'faith' is science. I can respect that.

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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[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

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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[Scott Lockwood]

We completely agree there. I am anti-death penalty.

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[Qzukk]

My question is, when they drained out the extra stuff, how much brain mass had he actually lost as opposed to just being compressed. I suspect the "after" picture isn't anywhere near as stunning as the "before" picture was.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

That was the "after" picture- 45 years after the shunt was removed at age 14.

Holy Cow

[Captain Splendid]

A dupe JE! Well, I never!

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

Nearly- this has slightly better evidence (in that the links provided have actual pictures of both Terry's CT scan and the Frenchman's MRI, for comparison).