Vegetative vs. Minimally Conscious
I want to correct my previous post on Carl Zimmer and his article What If There's Something Going On in There. In that post I stated something about brain activity of people in a vegetative state. Zimmer's post on Consciousness and the culture wars made me realize that his article talked about two different types of brain-impared state, vegetative and minimally conscious. There is some medical hope for the minimally conscious, but very little if any for the vegetative. The difference is an important one, particularly as it relates to the Schiavo case in Florida. There's a ferocious debate over who, if anyone, has the right to remove Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube.
I'm not the alone in my confusion. Says Zimmer in the weblog post:
(the minimally conscious state) is for people who show fleeting signs of awareness. He and his colleagues have shown that people who are diagnosed in a minimally conscious state are more likely a year after their injury to have better functional outcome than those who were diagnosed in a vegetative state. But the longer a person like Schiavo is in a vegetative state, the less likely it is that any recovery will happen.It can be hard to accept this. I've been surprised to discover this firsthand in the reactions to my article. In it, I wrote about how brain scans of people in minimally conscious states can show surprisingly complex responses to the sounds of voices and other stimuli. People in chronic vegetative states show no such responses. Yet I find my article keeps popping up as an exhibit in arguments that Schiavo is actually responsive and could recover. The latest example is a letter to the editor of the Tampa Tribune. In every case, people want to mix up the results from minimally conscious patients and people in a chronic vegetative state.
- Posted - 5:22:53 PM -
