Degrees of consciousness

Talk about who’s aware of what…

The big news last week out of England was that doctors had a ‘Eureka!’ moment when they discovered that an unresponsive, brain-injured woman actually showed clear signs of conscious awareness on brain imaging tests. But a lot of conscientious health care workers have known this for years.

One of my colleagues at Women for Faith & Family is a bioethics expert. Nancy Valko, President of the Missouri Nurses for Life, has worked with seriously disabled patients and delusional medial staff for years. She writes and speaks extensively about these issues. Here’s what she’s had to say lately about these news stories:

For those of us who have seen people judged “vegetative” respond or even recover, this “breakthrough” is not surprising. A few years ago, a doctor reported seeing the same kind of response but later backtracked and called it possible only for the “minimally conscious” – another artificial category.

And, of course, there is the requisite denial that Terri Schiavo could have ever improved-despite the evidence-because of the media/bioethics myth about Terri that must remain intact for the “right to die” movement’s propaganda.

That’s why they see these ‘rare’ cases of either recovery (like Haleigh Poutre) or signs of consciousness (like the woman in England) as such anomalies, when they may not be so rare. Even they have to admit they just don’t know what’s going on in the patient’s mind.

Here’s what Valko says about the news out of England:

Note this quote from the man who INVENTED the term “vegetative state: “One always hesitatates to make a lot out of a single case, but what this study shows me is that there may be more going on in terms of patients’ self-awareness than we can learn at the bedside,” said Dr. James Bernat, a professor of neurology at the Dartmouth Medical School, who was not involved in the study. “Even though we might assume some patients are not aware, I think we should always talk to them, always explain what’s going on, always make them comfortable, because maybe they are there, inside, aware of everything,”

A lot of us have known this and have been doing this for years. We’ve seen patients recover despite a diagnosis of a hopeless “vegetative” state. It’s the “experts” like Bernat, Cranford, O’Rourke, etc. who have dismissed our observations as ridiculous when we saw such patients start to respond. And when some of these patients recovered, we have seen the “experts” call it a miracle instead of admitting they were wrong. Worst of all, these recoveries did nothing in terms of the “experts” even rethinking their position when the next patient came along.

So, the collective consciousness of the pro-death movement can’t improve its capacity to think through the complexities of life better. And they’re the ones defining consciousness?