A Hand Reaching Back from the Grave?

Here's a bit from an interesting article in New Scientist magazine discussing research that has managed to communicate with people in a vegetative state:

Giving the 'unconscious' a voice

THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy.

"They can now have some involvement in their destiny," says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, who led the team doing the work.

...

One of the most difficult questions you might want to ask someone is whether they want to carry on living. But as Owen and Laureys point out, the scientific, legal and ethical challenges for doctors asking such questions are formidable. "In purely practical terms, yes, it is possible," says Owen. "But it is a bigger step than one might immediately think."

One problem is that while the brain scans do seem to establish consciousness, there is a lot they don't tell us. "Just because they can answer a yes/no question does not mean they have the capacity to make complex decisions," Owen says.

Even assuming there is a subset of people who cannot move but have enough cognition to answer tough questions, you would still have to convince a court that this is so. "There are many ethical and legal frameworks that would need to be revised before fMRI could be used in this context," says Owen.

Life and death are difficult topics. I know my own Mother had to give the coded message of "no heroic measures" to get the doctors to back off and let my Grandfather die. He was in and out of a series of pneumonia. A disease known as "an old person's friend" because in the good old days it would kill you if you were bed ridden and get you past your suffering. But today, technology can keep you alive so they can torture you will lots of "intervention" to keep you alive.

With my own Mother, left paralyzed on on one side with left neglect syndrome and cognitive "deficiencies" after a botched operation to remove cancer from her right parietal and occipital area of the brain, she asked the family to "get her out" of the hospital so we moved her to a hospice to let her die in relative peace.

I am really bothered by people who want to enforce their ethics on you which places "life" above everything. This is insane. A person has a right to dignity and enjoyment and control over their own affairs. It would be great if a person in a vegetative state was allowed to make a yes/no decision about their care. Who wants to be the prisoner of a beserk medical system intent on keeping you alive despite your medical condition? I get the heebie-jeebies every time I think of the film Johnny Got His Gun and the poor guy trapped in a torn up stump of a body.

I have no interest in hustling anybody else off life's stage if they want to cling to life. But I do get bothered when people -- and the state as an instrument of a fanatical few -- dictates control over my medical care. People need the right to refuse treatment, to say "enough", and have their wishes respected. And for those incapacitated, the family must retain the right to speak on behalf of the person. My experience of medical staff and hospitals during the few short weeks that my parents spent in the hands of "modern medicine" before their died puts real fear in me. Prior generations of my family died at home with family close by. They weren't subjected to the tortures of modern medicine.