by APFLI | May 20, 2015 | Euthanasia / Assisted Suicide - Archive
His feeding tube had been removed. Doctors said he had only a small chance of recovery. His wife pulled his feeding tube after a week. But Friday, Jesse Ramirez walked out of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. It has been an amazing five months for the US...
by APFLI | May 16, 2015 | Euthanasia / Assisted Suicide - Archive
A 23-yr-old woman, supposedly in a “vegetative state” stunned doctors by responding to certain commands asked of her. The results have been displayed in brain imaging showing more is going on in her head than meets the eye. Although the unnamed woman...
by APFLI | May 16, 2015 | Treatment Concerns - Definitions / Living Wills / Palliative Care / Terminal or Excessive Sedation / Organ Donation / DCD or NHBD / Hospice / POLST / DNR
Brain-damaged patients who appear to have lost signs of conscious awareness might still be able to create new memories — showing signs of new neural networks and potential for partial recovery, a new study shows. In patients who have survived severe brain...
by APFLI | May 11, 2015 | Euthanasia / Assisted Suicide - Archive
Researchers are gaining insights into why some minimally conscious patients with a severe brain injury appear to “awaken” after taking the sleep medication zolpidem (Ambien, Sanofi-Aventis). The answer may lie in a pool of recruitable and functional brain...
by APFLI | May 10, 2015 | Treatment Concerns - Definitions / Living Wills / Palliative Care / Terminal or Excessive Sedation / Organ Donation / DCD or NHBD / Hospice / POLST / DNR
Most people who sign organ donor cards assume that they will be carefully diagnosed as “brain dead” before their organs are donated. That was generally true years ago, but a new non-brain death organ donation procedure was developed in the 1990s even...