Please Try and Help Terri...... 4119

Pardon? You don't know.

Patients who survive catastrophic brain damage may be left permanently unaware---in the permanent vegetative state. Many doctors are likely to manage these patients at some point in their career. The diagnosis has been the subject of reports prepared by official bodies. It has been defined as "a clinical condition of unawareness of self and environment in which the patient breathes spontaneously, has a stable circulation, and shows cycles of eye closure and opening which may simulate sleep and waking." A wide range of causes has been reported, but head injury is probably the most common.

The diagnosis of permanent vegetative state is of particular importance; once it has been made, active medical treatment may be stopped. In the leading English case of Bland in 1993, the House of Lords held that artificial nutrition and hydration (for example, feeding by percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube) consbreastuted medical treatment and that if a patient was permanently unaware of self and environment, it was lawful not to continue such medical treatment. Up to October 1998, court approval to stop active medical treatment had been given for 18 patients.

Well, you did say something like, "The question is what kind of a society is this that allow this to happen?"

It's not my rhetoric. I believe we have had Peter refer to the "person society". Mother England? (see above).

-- In the long run the sheer physical inability of humans to keep up with these rapidly evolving progeny of our minds will ensure that the ratio of people to machines approaches zero, and that a direct descendant of our culture, but not our genes, inherits the universe." Hans Moravec