by APFLI | May 28, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
Kate, 36, communicates through a keyboard. Scientists have shown for the first time that a person diagnosed as being in a vegetative state can communicate. In 1997, when Kate was 26, she caught an acute viral infection. It was so serious that it confined her to a...
by APFLI | May 28, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
PVS & Ambien: Several studies are being conducted worldwide on patients thought to be in PVS, using zolpidem (Ambien) which actually wakes up to sixty percent of these patients. Tests conducted on a 23-year-old, severely brain damaged woman—clinically diagnosed as...
by APFLI | May 28, 2015 | Euthanasia / Assisted Suicide - Archive
A judge rejected a family’s plea that a 53-year-old woman in a supposed vegetative state should be allowed to die — at least until she is given a drug that could wake her up. Sir Mark Potter, president of the High Court Family Division, says the woman...
by APFLI | May 20, 2015 | Diagnosis - Brain Function / Coma / Persistant Vegetative State / Locked In Syndrome / Awakenings
If there’s one thing worse than being in a coma, it’s people thinking you are in one when you aren’t. Yet a new comparison of methods for detecting consciousness suggests that around 40 per cent of people diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are...
by APFLI | May 16, 2015 | Euthanasia / Assisted Suicide - Archive
A Quebec philosopher and ethicist has proposed that governments promote organ harvesting by offering tax credits to the individual’s family members. But according to one expert on ‘brain death,’ people are right to have a healthy fear of organ harvesting and, rather...