Determining a brain-injured patient's prognosis

This is an article from the New Yorker about brain scans of persons in low conscious and/or vegetative states; that there may be quite a bit going on in there: 
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/15/071015fa_fact_groopman

Silent Minds

What scanning techniques are revealing about vegetative patients.

by Jerome Groopman October 15, 2007

Ten years ago, Adrian Owen, a young British neuroscientist, was working at a brain-imaging center at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, at the University of Cambridge. He had recently returned from the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he used advanced scanning technology to map areas of the brain, including those involved in recognizing human faces, and he was eager to continue his research. The imaging center was next to the hospital’s neurological intensive-care unit, and Owen heard about a patient there named Kate Bainbridge, a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher who had become comatose after a flu-like illness, and was eventually diagnosed as being in what neurologists call a vegetative state. Owen decided to scan Bainbridge’s brain. “We were looking for interesting patients to study,” he told me. “She was the first vegetative patient I came across.”

For four months, Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or her doctors, although her eyes were often open and roving. (A person in a coma appears to be asleep and is unaware of even painful stimulation; a person in a vegetative state has periods of wakefulness but shows no awareness of her environment and does not make purposeful movements.) Owen placed Bainbridge in a PET scanner, a machine that records changes in metabolism and blood flow in the brain, and, on a screen in front of her, projected photographs of faces belonging to members of her family, as well as digitally distorted images, in which the faces were unrecognizable. Whenever pictures of Bainbridge’s family flashed on the screen, an area of her brain called the fusiform gyrus, which neuroscientists had identified as playing a central role in face recognition, lit up on the scan. “We were stunned,” Owen told me. “The fusiform-gyrus activation in her brain was not simply similar to normal; it was exactly the same as normal volunteers’.”

Excited by this result, Owen resolved to try to conduct brain scans of other vegetative patients in the Cambridge area. Since 1997, he has studied several dozen people, though he decided to use speech sounds rather than photographs to stimulate their brains. (Owen was concerned that showing images of faces might not be a reliable way to test recognition, since the eyes of vegetative patients often wander. “We shifted to auditory responses because you can always put a pair of headphones on the person and know that you are transmitting sound,” he said.) Three years ago, he began using a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner, which is faster than a PET scanner, capturing changes in blood flow in the brain almost as they occur. The patients’ brains were scanned while they listened to a recording of simple sentences interspersed with meaningless “noise sounds.” The scans of some of the patients showed the same response to the sentences as scans of healthy volunteers, but Owen wasn’t sure that the patients had understood the words. “So we went the next step up the cognitive ladder, to look at comprehension,” he said.
Psycholinguists have shown that when we hear a noun at the beginning of a sentence we tend to associate the word with its most common meaning. For example, Owen said, most people hearing a sentence that begins, “The shell was . . .” think of an object typically found at the beach. But if the sentence is completed by the phrase “fired at the tank,” the listener quickly corrects himself, a process that is evident on a brain scan. “You can actually see it happening and image it on the scanner,” Owen said. “The beautiful thing about the psychological task is that we just do it automatically. When you play ambiguous sentences, areas in the inferior frontal lobe and in the posterior temporal lobe become activated, and these areas are very important for speech comprehension. They show that you understand the meaning of the word: it’s not just about perceiving speech; it’s about decoding. Your brain somehow appreciates that there are two meanings to a word like ‘shell.’ ”

Owen eventually identified two vegetative patients whose brains showed the same activity in response to ambiguous sentences as the brains of healthy volunteers. He also took brain scans of healthy physicians, who were presented with the ambiguous sentences while under general anesthesia. Owen found that, as the effects of the anesthesia increased, the physicians showed less activity in the brain regions associated with comprehension. “That, of course, is in keeping with our personal experience of consciousness, which is that as you sort of drift into sleep you understand less and less of what is around you,” he said. (An article about this experiment appears this week in PNAS, the journal of the National Academy of Sciences.)
Owen’s final experiment was the most ambitious: a test to determine whether vegetative patients who seemed able to comprehend speech could also perform a complex mental task on command. He decided to ask them to imagine playing tennis. (“We chose sports, and tried to find one that involved a lot of upper-body movements and not too much running around,” he said.) First, he took brain scans of thirty-four healthy volunteers who were instructed to picture themselves playing the game for at least thirty seconds. Their brains showed activity in a region of the cerebrum that would be stimulated in an actual match. “This was an extremely robust activation, and it wasn’t difficult to tell whether somebody was imagining tennis or not,” Owen said. He then repeated the experiment using one of the vegetative patients, a woman who had been severely injured in a car accident. The woman had to be able to hear and understand Owen’s instructions, retrieve a memory of tennis including a conception of forehand and backhand and how the ball and the racquet meet and focus her attention for at least thirty seconds. To Owen’s astonishment, she passed the test. “Lo and behold, she produced a beautiful activation, indistinguishable from those of the group of normal volunteers,” he said. (Another vegetative patient, a man in his twenties, also passed the test, though Owen, having learned that the man was a soccer fan, asked him to imagine playing that sport instead of tennis.)
In September, 2006, Owen, along with Martin Coleman, a neuroscientist at Addenbrooke’s, and four other researchers, published an article about the tennis experiment in Science and ignited a vigorous debate. In letters to the journal, some neurologists argued that the woman must have been misdiagnosed a claim that Owen disputed. “She fulfilled all of the internationally agreed-upon criteria, and there wasn’t anything that she did that would lead anybody to say she wasn’t vegetative,” he told me. “Now, naturally, in hindsight she wasn’t vegetative; she was actually conscious. It’s a very interesting issue, because it means that she was in fact misdiagnosed, but not misdiagnosed in the sense that somebody made an error. Clearly, she is consciously aware of things around her. So something is missing in the diagnostic criteria.”
For decades, doctors assumed that patients who have been diagnosed as vegetative lack any capacity for conscious thought. Most are previously healthy people who suffered a traumatic brain injury, or oxygen deprivation after a heart attack or stroke, and have been regarded more or less as zombies: patients whose bodies continue to function sometimes for decades but whose minds are incapable of willed activity. (The term “vegetative” was proposed in 1972, by Bryan Jennett, a neurosurgeon, and Fred Plum, a neurologist, who chose it based on a definition in the O.E.D: “an organic body capable of growth and development but devoid of sensation and thought.”) In the occasional newspaper stories about someone who suddenly recovered consciousness after spending years in a vegetative state, the event was invariably described as a medically inexplicable “miracle.” The Mohonk Report, a paper prepared by a group of experts in brain injury and presented to Congress last year, cited estimates suggesting that there are approximately thirty-five thousand Americans in a vegetative state and another two hundred and eighty thousand in a minimally conscious state a less severe condition, in which patients show erratic evidence of deliberate behavior, such as responding to a simple command or focusing on a person or an object for a sustained period. Because insurers typically won’t pay for rehabilitation, on the assumption that such patients are unlikely to improve, most are given little in the way of therapy. “These people with brain trauma are out of our view,” Joseph Fins, an internist and medical ethicist at Weill Cornell Medical College, in Manhattan, and a member of the Mohonk group, told me. “We ignore them, and we sequester them in places where we can’t see them, usually in nursing homes.”
According to several American and British studies completed in the late nineties, patients suffering from what is known as “disorders of consciousness” are misdiagnosed between fifteen and forty-three per cent of the time. Physicians, who have traditionally relied on bedside evaluations to make diagnoses, sometimes misinterpret patients’ behavior, mistaking smiling, grunting, grimacing, crying, or moaning as evidence of consciousness.

 

Doctors can also miss signs of consciousness in vegetative patients, according to the British and American studies. Ten months after Owen and his colleagues completed the tennis experiment with the vegetative woman, she was brought back to the imaging center and placed in an MRI machine. “We were absolutely dismayed, because we scanned her and there was nothing,” Owen recalled. The team tested the woman again the next day. This time, in response to a command to play tennis, her brain showed normal activity in the regions that mediate arm movements. Owen now repeats scans for each patient, conducting them twice a day for three days. Patients with brain injuries have “seriously impaired attention capabilities and their levels of general arousal are likely to be shot,” he said. Recent research by Owen and other neuroscientists may eventually help make diagnoses more accurate, but it is not yet clear how the new brain-scan data will affect the medical understanding of consciousness.

As Owen put it, “The thought of coma, vegetative state, and other disorders of consciousness troubles us all, because it awakens the old terror of being buried alive. Can any of these patients think, feel, or understand those around them? And, if so, what does this tell us about the nature of consciousness itself?”

Owen’s article in Science was accompanied by an editorial by Lionel Naccache, a neurologist at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, in Paris, who called the results of the tennis experiment “spectacular.” “Despite the patient’s very poor behavioral status, the fMRI findings indicate the existence of a rich mental life, including auditory language processing and the ability to perform mental imagery tasks,” Naccache wrote.

 

 Yet he cautioned against drawing general conclusions about vegetative patients from a single case, and asked, “If this patient is actually conscious, why wouldn’t she be able to engage in intentional motor acts, given that she had not suffered functional or structural lesion of the motor pathways?” Prompted by questions like this, Naccache and several of his colleagues are conducting brain-imaging experiments with the goal of identifying objective indicators of consciousness, and thus enabling doctors to better evaluate patients who are unable to communicate their awareness of themselves or their environment.

We assimilate information unconsciously all the time; at any given moment, we process thousands of stimuli, of which we pay attention to only a few. As you read this sentence, you may not be aware of the birds singing in the back yard, but your brain has analyzed the sound and concluded that it poses no threat to you. In the past several decades, scientists have uncovered particularly dramatic examples of unconscious processing. In the early seventies, researchers at M.I.T. studied four patients who had experienced trauma to an area of the brain involved in vision and had been found to have a condition that was later called “blindsight.” These patients’ eyes functioned normally, but they did not perceive much of what was in their field of vision. When the researchers flashed a light at the patients and asked them to describe what they saw, the patients reported that they had seen nothing. Yet the researchers noticed that their eyes often located the source of the light. In a second experiment, a blindsight patient was shown pictures of faces displaying happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. The patient said that he could not see the faces, yet he was frequently able to correctly identify the emotions. The researchers concluded that, despite the patient’s injuries, pathways in his brain had been preserved which allowed him to process at least some visual data, even though he wasn’t consciously aware of doing so.

In the early nineteen-hundreds, the Austrian neurologist Hermann Zingerle described patients who, because of tumors or other abnormalities of the parietal lobe on the right side of the brain, ignored the left side of the body and objects in the left field of vision. (The right side of the brain controls awareness of the left side of the body.) For example, some of these patients would shave only the right side of their faces, since they were unaware of their left cheeks. In the nineteen-eighties, researchers determined that patients who had the syndrome ­now called “neglect”­ could process some objects in the left field of vision. In one experiment, a patient was shown two pictures of a house. The images were identical except that, in one, flames were emerging from a window on the left side of the façade. The patient said that she couldn’t see any difference between the images, but, when she was asked which house she would want to occupy, she almost always chose the one that was not on fire. “This is more complex than blindsight, because it means that the patient was unconsciously able to interpret and understand the symbolic meaning of the pictures,” Naccache said. “It is a powerful experiment to demonstrate that unconscious perception and unconscious cognition can reach upper levels of the brain.”

From these and other recent experiments, including his own, Naccache and his research team are developing a working medical definition of consciousness. “When we are conscious, the key property is our ability to report to ourselves or to others the content of the representations when I say, for example, ‘I am perceiving a flower,’ or the fact that I am conscious of speaking with you now on the telephone,” Naccache told me. “You have patients who are conscious, or who are able to make reports, but you can prove that some stimuli escaped their conscious reports, as in the case of blindsight or neglect. You can study the neural fate of these representations by showing that, even if the stimuli were not reported by the subject, they were still processed in the brain.” He added that, in the case of Owen’s vegetative patient who imagined playing tennis, it’s impossible to know whether she reported the event to herself which would suggest that she is capable of conscious thought or whether, as in the case of the blindsight and neglect patients, she had no subjective awareness of the experience. However, Naccache believes that consciousness also requires an ability to sustain a representation over time, which Owen’s patient clearly was able to do. “In assessing apparently vegetative patients who are unable to speak, and thus report, the direction of research should be to look for sustained representation,” he said. “If we can prove by neuro-imaging techniques that this person is able to actively maintain a given representation during tens of seconds, it provides strong evidence of conscious processing.”

Naccache has recently incorporated a third neurological feature into his definition of consciousness: broadcasting. In a person who is conscious, he explained, information entering the brain is processed in a few areas and then distributed or broadcast to many others. “It’s as though there is a kind of ignition in the brain, and then information is made available to a very rich number of regions,” Naccache told me. “And that makes sense, that the information is initially represented locally and then made available to a vast network, because the person has this ability to maintain the representation within the network for a long time.”

In 2005, Naccache conducted an experiment whose outcome suggested the importance of broadcasting as a marker of consciousness. First, he and his research team presented a series of words to three epileptic patients, who had had electrodes implanted temporarily in various brain regions, in an effort to locate the source of their seizures. The electrodes enabled doctors to record the activity in a given region. Some of the words, such as “blood” and “rape,” were chosen for their negative emotional connotations. The rest of the words, which included “chair” and “house,” were considered neutral. Each word was shown to the patients for twenty-nine milliseconds and then replaced with an image of a geometric figure, such as a rectangle. The patients reported seeing only the geometric figures. However, Naccache’s team discovered that in each patient the amygdala, a brain structure that is associated with strong negative emotions, such as fear, displayed much more activity in response to the negative words than to the neutral words.

“The picture we have now is that, unconsciously, many areas of the brain can process information, and that unconscious representation can be very abstract and very rich much more than neuroscientists thought some decades ago,” Naccache said. “But now we can begin to identify some limits of unconscious cognition. The activation picked up by the electrodes is not only evanescent but restricted to the amygdala and a few other regions, without broadcasting and amplification through the brain.”

 

 Owen’s tennis-playing patient may have been broadcasting information during the experiment, Naccache said, though he added that he is uncertain whether her diagnosis should be upgraded from vegetative to minimally conscious. Moreover, he said, brain-scan research cannot yet tell us much about such a patient’s prospects for improvement.

The J.F.K. Johnson Rehabilitation Institute, in Edison, New Jersey, is among the world’s largest centers for the treatment of brain injuries and one of the few places where patients suffering from disorders of consciousness participate in research studies and receive innovative therapy. In 2002, Joseph Giacino, a neuropsychologist at the institute, was the co-chair of the Aspen Work Group which was made up of experts in brain injury and helped formulate the criteria for diagnosing a minimally conscious state. “I think the rehabilitation field was ahead of the curve in understanding that there were subpopulations of patients who were not in a coma, were not in a vegetative state, but really were not conscious, at least in the way we think about normal consciousness,” Giacino told me. “In the medical literature, these patients were lumped together with everybody else.”

The techniques that Giacino uses to diagnose patients require no sophisticated technology. He recalled making rounds at the institute with two eminent neurologists and stopping at the bedside of a woman who had had a brain hemorrhage. The neurologists examined the woman, who lay with her eyes half closed and did not respond to the doctors’ commands. The neurologists concluded that she was in a vegetative state. “So I sort of sheepishly said, ‘Let me show you what happens when we stimulate her,’ ” Giacino recalled. He had been using a technique called “deep-pressure stimulation,” which involves squeezing a patient’s muscles with force and precision.

Giacino started with the woman’s face and worked his way down to her toes, pinching her muscles between his fingers. As he explained, the nerve endings of the muscles send impulses to the brain stem, which relays them to other brain structures and rouses the patient to consciousness. “I did a cycle of deep-pressure stimulation, and within a minute or so she was talking to us,” Giacino said. “The neurologists were flabbergasted.” The woman was able to say her name and her husband’s name, and answer simple questions, such as “Is there a cup at your bedside?” After a few minutes, however, she became unresponsive again.

The woman had what Giacino calls a “drive disorder,” in which a patient is unable to speak, move, or, possibly, think unless physically stimulated by touch. Doctors believe that such disorders are caused by damage to the limbic lobes or to other parts of the brain that trigger and sustain behavioral responses. Some patients with drive disorders respond to drugs that increase brain levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is associated with arousal.

 “Imagine if the woman were in a nursing home,” Giacino said. “Somebody would stop by for three minutes, check her bedpan, and present simple commands like ‘Squeeze my hand,’ ‘Close your eyes,’ and ‘Open your mouth.’ She is not going to do any of those things, but she clearly had a significant amount of preserved function. It had to be harnessed externally.”

At J.F.K. Johnson, patients with drive disorders receive behavioral and drug therapy. (Some patients improve, but prospects for recovery are largely determined by the extent and nature of the damage to the drive system.)

Since 2002, the institute has been experimenting with using brain scans to assist with diagnoses. Giacino cited the case of a male patient whose condition had been diagnosed as vegetative but who appeared to have strong emotional responses to people around him. “If a nurse came in to do his care, it looked like he was screaming silently,” Giacino recalled.

“His mouth would be wide open, and he had an agonized, contorted face, like the one in Edvard Munch’s painting ‘The Scream.’ The expression would occur if there was a lot of noise around him, or if he was being physically handled, but then his mother would come into the room, lower the lights, talk with him in a soothing voice, and it would just go away.”

When doctors scanned the man’s brain, they discovered that portions of the right hemisphere involved in emotional processing were intact. (Other parts of the right hemisphere were damaged.) “This shows you how treacherous diagnostic assessment can be,” Giacino said. “One can retain one piece of a network but be disconnected from other structures and other networks, so that there is almost no subjective awareness associated with this complex behavior. I’ve seen other patients with other behaviors that seem to be outside the scope of a vegetative state. Then you image them and you find out some circuits are still relatively preserved, while most of the rest of the brain is not.”

However, brain-scan technology has also helped doctors identify one patient at J.F.K. Johnson as a candidate for an experimental therapy. The patient, a thirty-eight-year-old man who suffered a head injury and had been living in a nursing home for six years, arrived at the institute in 2004. He appeared to be minimally conscious; he occasionally mouthed single words when prompted, but he was unable to respond reliably to simple questions, or to chew and swallow. (He had a feeding tube.) In 2001, PET and fMRI scans had been taken of the man’s brain, and, according to Giacino, one of many researchers involved in the case, “the findings were totally unexpected. The PET scan showed little metabolic activity, but the fMRI scan showed that the region of the cortex involved in processing language functioned in a fairly normal way.”

The researchers speculated that, because of damage to the man’s frontal lobe, thalamus, and brain stem areas involved in regulating arousal the nerve signals in his brain were muted. As Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College who led the study of the man’s brain, put it, “It’s as if a radio were turned to such a low volume that you couldn’t hear the music distinctly.” He added, “The scans confirmed our expectation that this patient had a greater capacity for language than he demonstrated.”

In August, Schiff, Giacino, Joseph Fins, and Ali Rezai, a neurosurgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, along with twelve other researchers, published an article about the case in Nature. The researchers described implanting electrodes in the man’s thalamus, which, by stimulating the brain tissue, had enabled him to regain considerable physical and mental function.

 “Deep brain stimulation can promote significant late functional recovery from severe traumatic brain injury,” they wrote. When the electrodes were turned on in the man’s thalamus, his speech improved, his movements became more fluid, and he was able to chew and swallow. When the researchers turned off the electrical stimulation, the man soon relapsed. He is now being given regular doses of electrical stimulation and is able to speak in short sentences and to chew and swallow. The researchers concluded that the case “challenges the existing practice of early treatment discontinuation” for minimally conscious patients who show some “interactive behaviors.”

Few vegetative or minimally conscious patients ever recover fully, and many are unlikely to improve. (Some neurologists estimate that an adult who has been vegetative for six months following a traumatic brain injury has only a twenty-per-cent chance of regaining consciousness.)

For the past three years, Schiff and Fins have been studying the brain of Terry Wallis, a forty-three-year-old man in rural Arkansas who had been the subject of national news stories in 2003, when it was reported that he had begun to speak after spending nineteen years in a nursing home, in a minimally conscious state. Schiff and Fins contacted Wallis’s family and offered to help him obtain medical care during his recovery, and to use brain scans to document his progress.

 In 1984, Wallis, a nineteen-year-old truck mechanic, had been in a car accident and sustained a severe brain injury; he was also paralyzed. Wallis’s father had asked the nursing home to arrange an evaluation of his son by a neurologist, but was told that such an assessment was too expensive and, in any case, would not be useful.

In 2003, when Wallis began to speak, he received twelve weeks of physical therapy, which was covered by Medicaid, but the Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services rejected his request for further treatment, concluding that he had not made sufficient progress.

 One day, in 2005, Fins, who had contacted Wallis’s congressman to solicit his help in obtaining additional medical care for Wallis, asked Mrs. Wallis for her son’s Social Security number. “I was on the phone, and Mrs. Wallis said to Terry, ‘What’s your Social Security number?’ ” Fins recalled. “He gives his number, and I write it down. And I said, ‘Mrs. Wallis, was that Terry?’ And she said, ‘Yup. The first time he told us his Social Security, we thought he was wrong. But we looked it up, and he was right.’ ”

Fins was astonished. Not only has Wallis recovered memories from his life before the accident but, Fins said, “he is picking up American culture. He now knows the song ‘Bad boys, bad boys, what are you gonna do.’ Why is that important? It’s important because that song didn’t exist in 1984, so Terry is laying down new memories. It shows sustained improvement.”

 In 2006, Schiff arranged for Wallis to be taken to Weill Cornell Medical College, where he examined his brain using a sophisticated technique called diffusion tensor imaging, which assesses the number and health of axons, long fibres that transmit nerve impulses from one brain cell to another. The scans suggested that the axons in Wallis’s brain were growing and forming new connections a finding that contradicts the long-standing assumption that a damaged brain is incapable of healing after such a lengthy period.

 “We need to do longitudinal studies, to see if these kinds of changes are accruing over time, whether they happen frequently or infrequently, and what their association with the patient’s level of function is,” Schiff told me. In some cases, he speculated, the brain may sometimes be able to bypass an injured area and devise novel ways of connecting axons. Still, he went on, much about Wallis’s recovery and the neurological developments that are driving it - remains a mystery. “After nineteen years, Terry spoke a few words, but within seventy-two hours he recovered fluent, expressive, and receptive language,” Schiff said.

Kate Bainbridge, the first vegetative patient that Adrian Owen studied in Cambridge, has also made considerable progress, recovering the use of her arms, and much of her mental function, although she is unable to walk. She still has difficulty talking, and uses a letter board to communicate with people who are not used to her speech. “Most scans show what is wrong with your brain, which doctors need to know,” Bainbridge wrote to me in an e-mail. “But Adrian Owen’s scans show what is working. I say they found parts of my brain were working. It really scares me to think what might have happened to me if I had not had the scans. They show people it was worth carrying on even though my body was unresponsive.”

Pair face trial over euthanasia

Two Sydney women have denied that they either murdered an Alzheimer's victim, or they aided and abetted his suicide.

Shirley Justins, 59, and her friend, Caren Jenning, 74, were arraigned today in the NSW Supreme Court.

They both pleaded not guilty to murdering former Qantas pilot Graeme Wylie, who was the 71-year-old partner of Justins.

They also pleaded not guilty to the alternative charge of aiding and abetting the suicide of Mr Wylie, who left an estate worth about $2.5 million.

He died of a lethal dose of the barbiturate drug Nembutal on March 22 last year, at the home he shared with Justins at Cammeray on Sydney's north shore.

Justice Graham Barr continued the women's bail and set down their trial for May 5.

The trial, before Justice Michael Adams, is expected to last about four weeks.

An earlier court hearing was told police alleged Jenning travelled to Mexico in March last year and returned home with the drug, which is only available to vets in Australia.

Swiss authorities had allegedly rejected an application in November 2005 for Mr Wylie to take his own life in Switzerland, where euthanasia is legal.

Police also contended that Mr Wylie's will had been changed a week before his death to favour Justins.

Since the trial has been set for May 5 next year, it would be wrong of me to make any comments that might in any way prejudice the case. However, it does seem strange that one of the women travelled to Mexico in March last year and that she returned home with the barbiturate, Nembutal. Both women are associated with the Voluntary Euthanasia society.

What is really suspicious is that Mr. Wylie's will was changed a week before his death to favour Shirley Justins. This is something that a jury will have to seriously consider when dealing with all of the facts of this case.

Voluntary euthanasia is not legal in this country, and it is possible for people to manipulate a situation, such as someone having Alzheimer's Disease, in order to gain financial advantage. On the surface this appears to be the case.

Doctors support drugs to speed newborn deaths

Doctors support drugs to speed newborn deaths | NEWS.com.au

This is a very concerning report because it shows that doctors are forgetting their own Hippocratic oath, by even considering such a course of action. If this is the way that they are thinking it is a real worry if the situation for the child is not as bad as the doctor claims:

ONE in three medical specialists is prepared to break the law by using painkillers or sedatives to hasten the death of a baby born with a severe life-threatening disability.

An anonymous survey of neonatologists in Australia and New Zealand also found almost half were willing to use medication to speed up death in critically ill newborns for whom further treatment was considered hopeless.

Peter Barr, a senior physician at the Children's Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, who conducted the study, said the desire to alleviate a baby's pain and suffering sometimes outweighed doctors' concerns about the law.

"This was a self-reporting questionnaire where neonatologists responded to hypothetical situations, so we don't know exactly what they do in practice, but we know what their preferences are," Dr Barr said. "They were presenting their views, knowing that they were not lawful." 

While neonatologists commonly withdraw or withhold treatment in newborns with a terminal disease or severe disability, it is illegal to use medication to hasten a person's death.

However, doctors reported that they would prefer to use painkillers or sedation to hasten death rather than withholding oxygen or nutrients.

"For example, if further medical treatment has been deemed therapeutically non-beneficial or overly burdensome, then neonatologists may consider it more compassionate and humane to purposefully hasten death unlawfully with analgesia-sedation than, for instance, to forgo gastric tube feeding, which may be lawful," the study found.

"Hence neonatologists seem to support the moral notion that it is sometimes 'better to kill than let die' - even though the former is unlawful and seem not to respect the 'sanctity of life'." Dr Barr also discovered there was a link between doctors' personal fear of death and their ethical beliefs.

"Neonatologists who said that they were prepared to hasten death when death was inevitable had a greater of fear of death than those who thought that it was unacceptable," Dr Barr said.

"Fear of the dying process and premature death may unconsciously motivate these neonatologists to do what they can to ease the baby's suffering and hasten their death, and that takes priority over the legal implications."

University of Queensland professor of medical ethics Malcolm Parker said doctors who chose to break the law were motivated by compassion.

"It's never easy for clinicians faced with that situation but I'm sure they feel compelled in very severe cases to do what they believe is the most humane thing," he said.

It is alleged that the doctors who chose to break the law by giving the babies sedatives are "motivated by compassion", but is this a false compassion. What is disturbing though, is that the withdrawal of a gastric feeding tube is considered lawful and the use of sedatives is considered illegal. Yet, the withdrawal of the gastric feeding can in fact cause a very cruel death, and this is still something that is euthanasia. The patient has not died naturally if starved and dehydrated to death. I can understand that these baby doctors would not want to see a baby face such an horrendous death, which would then probably motivate their actions. However, I am not sure that this is real compassion. It remains euthanasia.

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Nurse suspected of mercy killing of 97 year old woman

Nurse suspected of mercy killing | NEWS.com.au

This story was posted in February and I have not seen anything further. The hospital had ordered toxicology tests on the woman who died mysteriously. She was 97 years old. Perhaps she died of natural causes after all.

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Doctor cleared of misconduct charge | Health | SocietyGuardian.co.uk

Doctor cleared of misconduct charge | Health | SocietyGuardian.co.uk

This is a case of baby euthanasia. The doctor has been cleared by the medical board of misconduct, but the morality applied by the British medical board in this case might be open to question. On the surface it is hard for a non-professional to recognize infant euthanasia at work. It is necessary to look more closely at the wording related to the incident to see that what the doctor did, even if he thought that he was helping the baby because of its pain was morally reprehensible.

In such a case I find it hard to know where to draw the line. The baby was dying and it was distressed and the doctor chose to give it medication that worked as a muscle relaxant. The dose of medication was sufficient to kill the baby. It really is a very fine line and I do not applaud the actions taken by this doctor.

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Doctors: let us kill disabled babies - Sunday Times - Times Online

Doctors: let us kill disabled babies - Sunday Times - Times Online

It started with the demand to make the pill more freely available to women. Then women demanded the right to kill their unborn babies without facing murder charges; next came the cries in favour of voluntary euthanasia. Now, the doctors have begun the campaign to kill disabled babies.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology has put forward the proposal to kill via euthanasia seriously disabled newborn babies. It seems that they want to play God. This kind of decision making brings the U.K. closer and closer to following the eugenics of pre-war Germany.

The excuse for promoting the murder of disabled babies, is that of the emotional and financial hardship of bringing up the sickest babies. It seems that the doctors who are making this proposal have not heard of a sick baby having any form of quality of life.

In part they have stated:

“A very disabled child can mean a disabled family,” it says. “If life-shortening and deliberate interventions to kill infants were available, they might have an impact on obstetric decision-making, even preventing some late abortions, as some parents would be more confident about continuing a pregnancy and taking a risk on outcome.”

The submission that the college gave to the Nuffield Council of Bioethics states in part:

“We would like the working party to think more radically about non-resuscitation, withdrawal of treatment decisions, the best interests test and active euthanasia as they are ways of widening the management options available to the sickest of newborns.”

The euthanasia of newborn infants is illegal in the U.K. However, as a result of this submission the college has succeeded in having euthanasia of the newborn to be considered. The college wants the "mercy" killing of newborn babies to be debated by society.

The problem with this proposal is that the doctors who have already been killing newborns that they see will not have a quality of life, have already stepped onto the slippery slope of evil. At the present time euthanasia of newborn infants is permitted in the Netherlands for a range of incurable disorders. However, where does one draw the line? Even if some of the illnesses are incurable at the present time, that does not mean that there will not be cures in the near future.

If the euthanasia of very sick newborn infants was permitted, then parents would face the inevitable pressure to kill their children, even if this is against their own moral and religious principles. We already see the way in which pressure is being placed upon very young girls to abort their babies. I am certain that similar pressures will be placed upon the already stressed parents.

There is nothing worse for expectant mothers and fathers than learning that their child has some form of illness. It is worse when the baby is alive right up until the time that he is due to be born, and then due to the incompetence of the medical staff, the baby fails to be born alive. (a member of my family lost her son as a result of the incompetence of the doctor where she had been booked to have her baby). How unbearable then, if a child is born with a weak heart, and the doctor then puts pressure on the parents to allow him or her to kill the child because of the financial cost of the care for the child. This is an alarming development.

I hope that the U.K. will have the good sense not to permit such an atrocity to happen. The U.K. needs to review its attitude regarding abortion on demand, because too many children are being killed in the womb. This proposal is untenable, and should be resisted by all potential parents.

Terri Schiavo's Former Husband Michael Campaigned for Losing Candidates

Terri Schiavo's Former Husband Michael Campaigned for Losing Candidates

Despite Michael Schiavo's bravado regarding his pledge to fight against all pro-life candidates in the elections who attempted to save Terri, the candidates who got his endorsement failed in the elections.
From Colorado to Florida, Schiavo's endorsement has been the kiss of death. It seems that at least in Colorado Schiavo's kiss of death has been good news for the pro-life campaign. Schiavo had attended a debate in late October, and he had hurled abuse at the pro-life candidate. She won the election.

Jim Davis had sought Michael Schiavo's endorsement in Florida for the role of governor. Charlie Crist was the successful candidate.

Michael Schiavo endorsed the extreme left candidate Ned Lamont. Joe Lieberman, who was one of the congressmen who voted to help the Schindlers, and who lost the Democrat's endorsement, has been returned to the Congress as an independent.

The good news here is that the pro-life candidates were successful and that means that the American Congress will continue to have a balance so that the Culture of Death that has been gaining in popularity amongst the extreme left wing of the USA will not be able to fully implement their policies. The bad news, of course, is that the Democrats have gained control of the Congress.

What value those who are brain injured?

A new madness is overtaking bioethics for it has been reported and discussed in the technical journal, BIOEDGE that some bioethicists are suggested that it is ethical to do experiments upon people who are considered to be in a Permanent Vegetative State (PVS). There are obviously a lot of ethical considerations in this latest mad plan that brings us ever closer to achieving the Nazi goal of eugenics.

The ethicists who are making this proposal seem to think that someone who is PVS is already dead, and that the issue of using the body for medical experiments could be resolved if there had been prior written consent based upon the possibility of permanent cortical injury. However, good medical ethics demands that a person is not considered dead until the heart stops beating, the person stops breathing and there is no further sign of life. What is alleged to be brain death is in fact brain injury. If the person can breathe without life support then that person is not dead by definition.

We should not be giving in to this kind of thinking. It is ethically immoral to consider people who have brain injury to be worthless human beings. I can best illustrate my statement by using a living example of a woman diagnosed as PVS but through the dedication of her family, she is now a functioning person.

The woman in question is Chinese, and about 5 years ago she suffered a brain injury, probably due to a stroke. She survived the intensive care and upon her discharge from hospital her husband began the task of intensive physiotherapy. In the 6 months since I met this woman, I have seen her personal progress. She is able to wave to people, and she can reach out to shake hands. She recognizes those who are becoming familiar to her, and she acknowledges us when we speak to her with a smile. She is able to walk unaided in the swimming pool, and with aid around the perimeter of the pool. She is an example of what can happen when the brain injured are not left for dead but are given ample opportunity to receive therapy on a very regular basis.

People with brain injury are not to be considered as PVS since they are to respond to others who are with them. This is why the Schiavo case was fought with such ferocity. The principles involved continue to remain the same. The court was wrong to have granted Michael Schiavo the right to kill his brain injured wife because she was not dying, and she was not relying on life support. A feeding tube is not life support, but withdrawing the tube in order to cause dehydration and starvation is wife abuse, and it is also an abuse of one's human rights. The higher courts in the USA acted without any pity or justice in this case. However, the pro-euthanaisa crowd have been enboldened by the fact of Terri's death. They do not understand that they are lining up for the affliction of a very heavy punishment as a result of these unjust laws relating to the rights of people who have severe brain injury.

Minimally Conscious or Brain dead?

Once again the name of Terri Schiavo has hit the newspapers, only this time she is being compared to a man who was minimally conscious for 19 years. No one knows why it is happening but this man’s brain seems to be healing and he has come out of the minimally conscious state.

This raises the question about whether the judge involved in the Schiavo case should have made the decision to allow Terri to be killed by the pulling of her feeding tube. The press are being careful to continue the cover up about Terri’s condition and some are continuing to perpetuate the myth that she was brain dead. However, I question the notion that Terri was brain dead because her medical records actually state that she was neurologically awake. Since that was the case then Terri was not brain dead and the people who persist with that particular lie need to find out all of the information regarding her state of health. After all brain dead people do not laugh at jokes.

BioEdge 201: Texas law relating to futile care under fire

I have been following the case of Andrea Clarke who is under a death sentence because the doctors at St. Luke's Hospital in Texas have decreed that further treatment is futile care.

Bio Edge has provided me with a new perspective on this case, including a bit more in the way of background on Andrea Clarke.

Andrea is a 54 year old woman who is being kept alive on life support equipment and a dialysis machine. She is a widow with a 23 year old son. She does not have an advanced directive with regard to her health care but her relatives insist that she wants to live. Jerry Ward, is the lawyer for the family.

What is interesting about Andrea is that she was a blue baby and she required heart surgery when she was very young. This means that she was always a person with delicate health. Andrea had health problems in November and in January she had open heart surgery. She is now in the hands of another doctor who is directing her treatment and there has been signs of improvement.

Andrea's case is one of many cases that are emerging in Texas since the introduction of legislation that was signed by George W. Bush in 1999. The way in which the hospital committees are deciding whether or not a case should be considered as futile care might in fact be open to a lot of criticism.

The original intent of the legislation was meant to apply to people who were in fact dying. Andrea is not dying and this is why it is difficult for her family to accept that her case is one where further care is futile.

I am reading about more and more cases from Texas where the doctors are telling families that they are going to cease treatment and they are giving the families 10 days to find another facility before they pull the plug on treatment that is being given to the sick person.

In Andrea Clark's case, she has insurance. Could it be that the insurance company is putting pressure on the hospital with regard to the cost of the care that Andrea requires? If this is not the situation then it might be a case of the doctors in St. Luke's hospital are too inexperienced to offer the best form of care for Andrea so that she begins to recover from her open heart surgery.

People who have been born with a hole in the heart should not have to face this kind of treatment as they grow older. Andrea's case seems to be one where the doctors are attempting to practice passive euthanasia on the patient. If the patient is responding due to the care of the new doctor, then one has to question the competence of the doctors at St. Lukes when it comes to how they have been caring for Andrea. In the months after her operation, was Andrea getting the kind of optimal care required so that she would survive and continue to progress, or has that care been substandard?

The Andrea Clarke case is yet another example of how the culture of death is gaining strength within the hospital system in the USA. The danger of this situation is that other countries are emulating the lead of those doctors who believe that they can give up on a patient and claim that further care is futile. This is an effort to clear the system of long term patients who have the potential to survive, but they have been slow to progress.

With so many cases like Andrea's case that are emerging in Texas, it might be time to have a closer look at the way in which the culture of death is gaining a foothold in that state thanks to legislation whose purpose is being distorted by the system.

Killing Babies, Compassionately

Killing Babies, Compassionately

Wesley Smith has written an article that examines the Groningen Protocol in light of the German experience. It seems that the Dutch are upset over the comparisons between the Groningen Protocol and the Nazi decree that brought about the termination of the lives of babies that were born with birth defects as well as the adult disabled population.

If one truly examines the history of euthanasia, it is not hard to see that the Dutch medical profession are continuing along the path that started in Germany. The path to the murder of the disabled began in the 1920s when two men wrote a book outlining when it would be appropriate to put the disabled to death. From that beginning, babies who were born with severe disability were taken to a clinic and they were "put to sleep". In other words they were put down as though they were a dog or a cat.

Hitler became involved when a father wrote to him about his son who had severe disability. Hitler sent his advisors to have a look at the boy. These murderers wanted protection from the state so that they could continue with their killing of the innocent. Hitler gave them that protection.

Now let us move forward to the present Dutch experience, that is being copied in other parts of the world. The measure that is being used is that they are taking the life of a severely disabled baby because it is considered to not have a quality life. It is the notion of a quality of life that ought to be challenged, and indeed Justice Holman in his decision on baby MB did in fact consider that case from the point of view that we cannot define the quality of life of the child from pain alone. It must be noted that baby MB's condition is such that he suffers from a lot of pain but he has a quality of life because of his interaction with his family.

The other thing that comes out of Smith's article is the way in which the Dutch, just like the Germans before them apply a notion of compassion. This compassion is a false compassion because it is solely based upon the premise that the person does not have a right to live because the life is different from that of other people.

There are grave implications as a result of the implementation of the Groningen Protocol. I do not think that we can ignore those implications either now or in the future because as more and more people embrace these ideas, people with disability are being placed at risk. For example, what has been happening in the USA is that there has been an insidious campaign against people who are ill, or have some form of disability. Ever since the 1960s there has been a revival of the push for what is termed voluntary euthanasia. The Living Will that is improperly drafted can end up as a death warrant for people who sign a form without reading and understanding the implications of what is being signed. It is now common practice for doctors to refuse to treat someone they deem to be unworthy of living. This same risk aslo exists in Great Britain as well as in Australia. What happens in the USA is being copied in Australia, even though our case law is supposed to follow the protocols that are set up in Westminster.

In the past 50-60 years what we have witnessed is a push by the medical profession to absolved themselves when they deliberately take a life. The push for both the legalisation of abortion on demand and the legalisation of euthanasia on demand, has its roots in the early philosophies that were preached in Germany. They also have their roots in the desire to keep out of jail. There is a very real fear that those who were participating in what had been illegal should be prosecuted. That is why these professionals set out to change public opinion into their way of thinking.

The Groningen Protocol is the same as the German Protocol. The only difference is the lack of the backing of a political party. There are implications here for everyone, especially the unborn who then become premature babies. Their prematurity is a determinant in whether they are given the right to survive or must die because some adult says that their tiny lives are not worth living. It is through something like the Groningen Protocol that Michael Schiavo has been allowed to murder his wife. The lawyer George Felos, kept on spreading the lie that Terri was not able to feel anything and that when everything that sustained her life was taken away that she would not feel a thing but that she would drift off into oblivion. Yet, that statement was a lie. The other statement that he used to soften up the community is that there are thousands around the USA who die as a result of this technique every day. What Felos failed to understand that the majority public opinion cannot make the action right.

When the world turns away from God - entering the slippery slope

How is it that a nation that was populated by people with the Judeo-Christian ethic could go astray so much that the majority no longer recognize those things that are morally right and morally wrong? It did not start with the Schiavo scandal because the rot itself began in an earlier period - when the justices of the Supreme Court made an erroneous decision relating to abortion on demand. The principles of Roe vs. Wade set the nation of the USA onto the first rung of the slippery slope into oblivion. Every time the Supreme court has failed to overturn Roe vs. Wade, another step was taken on the rungs of the slippery slope. Out of that decision the world itself has seen what can only be described as an obscene push to kill as many unborn babies as possible because the lives of these babies are no longer held to be sacred, either in the eyes of other human beings, or in spite of the existence of God. That one decision in the USA was echoed in other countries such as Australia, Great Britain, Holland, Ireland (yes even Catholic Ireland has fallen into Satan's snare), France (a once great Catholic nation) and the list goes on. The judiciary in Australia was used to decide a number of similar cases, and instead of following the precedent of case law the justices of the Courts decided that they had the right to make a decision that did not fit either the law of the land, or case law precedent. These decisions have become all hallowed and enshrined as though they can never be removed for the bad decisions that they happened to be, and the laws that were also enacted as a result of Roe vs. Wade have likewise become enshrined in the minds of feeble-minded men and women who desire to continue with the foetal bloodshed. It seems that there is a rush to reach the edge over which the slippery slope becomes extremely steep for those countries that have been willing to walk the plank into oblivion.

It is within this framework that we start to see the renewed push for euthanasia on demand. The first part has now been quite literally fulfilled, for in some places abortions are offered as though the taking of a lfe is just some meaningless action, to which the doctor is firmly obligated without the exception of being allowed to object. It is within this framework that what had been an almost secret society began to get very vocal. Just like abortion on demand, there are some who are so vocal that they wil not accept no for an answer. It is for this reason that we see the rise of such illustrious criminal minds as Jack Kevorkian in the USA and Philip Nietzche in Australia. Whilst Kevorkian is serving time because of his actions, Nietzche has remained a free man. He has even gone as far as setting up shop in NZ in an effort to retain what he sees as a money spinning business. His victim, Nancy, was given the impression that she was dying from cancer. However, this woman did not have cancer at the time of her autopsy. So yet another very dangerous situation had developed in the world.

This world of death that is promoted through Planned Parenthood and other illustrious organisations. The hospice movement in the USA should be about helping the sick and dying to be more comfortable as they are dying. However, not everyone who ends up in a hospice is sick and dying. The system itself has been abused by those who want to get away with murder, through court sanction. In states such as Florida the sanctioning of murder via the courts has been on the increase. This is the very nub of the Schiavo scandal. The court system failed to take into account that the estranged adulterous husband had vested interests and reasons to force Terri to die in a way that is not even sanctioned for domestic pets.

One of the lame excuses for wanting this cruel execution to take place given by George Felos and Michael Schiavo happened to be that the removal of a feeding tube is something that happens to thousands of people every day. It is but a lame excuse because in the majority of those cases the people were dying and the continued giving of hydration and nutrition would not have been appropriate for their rapidly deteriorating condition. In Terri's case, since she was neither a carrot, tomato, potato or cucumber, it was not appropriate because she was not dying but was very much alive. In fact she was cognizant.

If the principle established in baby MB's case by justice Holman had been used in the Schiavo case, then there is no way that Terri would have been allowed to die. According to the written judgement in this case, if the person is cognizant and interacts with family members then that person has a quality of life. In such a circumstance the request to end the life can be denied. The proviso in MB's case (a very sick baby with SMA type 1.1) if the condition should deteriorate to the point where treatment is invasive, painful and will not change the outcome then doctors do not have to give the treatment. The difference here is that in the baby's case, if he has a heart attack because of his condition, the doctors will not have to use life saving equipment to prolong his life.

However, when Michael Schiavo first applied to remove his wife's feeding tube, he only did so when the Florida law had been changed in order to include feeding tubes as medical equipment. The argument that has been consistently used by Schiavo, that Terri made a non-existant request that she not remain hooked to machines, becomes even more nonsensical when one suddenly realises that a feeding tube is not the same thing as life support. The feeding tube gives nutrition and hydration, but life support consists of those measures that keep the heart pumping, the lungs breathing and the brain ticking over. A PEG tube just does not cut it as life support. If a very sick baby like MB was taken off the ventilator then he would die very rapidly because without the ventilator, he cannot breathe. On the other hand, Terri was left for 13 days of total agony as she lay there dying of starvation and dehydration.

The Schiavo line continues to be that Terri did not feel anything. His buddy George Felos had strenuously argued on the TV interviews that when the tube was taken away Terri would slip into oblivion and feel nothing as she quietly slipped away. That kind of talk was nothing short of an illusion. It was a smokescreen for the truth of the situation. A person who was nearing the end of a battle with cancer might slip into oblivion in that way, but a woman who was alive and vibrant was being condemned to a death that was encountered by the brave people at Auschwitz and the other concentration camps as they steadily defied the SS. This was the kind of death that was endured by St. Maximilian Kolbe, who was probably the last of the saints in his bunker to die of dehydration and starvation forced upon them as punishment for some crime against the Nazi prison guards. That form of argument was false when it was first stated and it remains false even though Terri is death. Thirteen days without water is totally horrendous.

However, once Terri died the way was open for others to try and kill the one who had become a burden because of brain injury. The case of Scott Thomas illustrates this point, and because this is still the subject of the courts it is best not to make too many comments about the complicity of the wife in Scott's injuries. For the moment, Scott's mother has custody of her son and she has been able to prevent him being forced into hospice, where the wife wants to do away with him. There has also been the case of Haleigh Poutre where the step mother and father had severely beaten Haleigh, at at the urging of her biological mother, the department who is in charge of her well being applied to the court to have Haleigh put down as though she were a dog.

On other fronts we heard about Mae Magourick from Georgia, where the grand-daughter used the rather glib statement: "It is time for granny to go home to Jesus". Sorry dear, but the only one who can choose the time for granny to go is God the Father. Only God the Father will decide who is in and who is out of favour and destined for the hottest place outside of the earth. ;-). It is not up to us to make this kind of unilateral decision-making. It is God's choice alone. The lady in question was wrong, and all Christian preachers who state that it is ok to think in this way are also wrong. They are not teaching according to what Christ taught all of us. Allowing a person to be starved and dehydrated to death on the grounds that the person should be allowed to go home to Jesus is just not a part of Judeo-Christian teaching.

When the world turns away from God - there will be more like Terri

As a Catholic who practices her faith, it is very difficult for me to accept what happened to Terri Schindler-Schiavo. As we move towards the anniversary of her court ordered death, we stop and pause to remember that if Terri really wanted to die as her adulterous husband claimed, then she would have given in against him a long time prior to her death. Michael Schiavo did everything possible in an attempt to make Terri die. He took away every single pleasure and stimulation in an attempt to force her to lose the will to live. He even prevented her family from coming to visit for what must have been to Terri an interminable amount of time. Yet Terri did not give in to this form of tyranny and she lived until the point where she was forced to die in what can only be described as torturous death that would not be all that different from the torture and persecution faced by the early Christians.

My Catholic faith, as well as my study of the Scripture has taught me to recognize that when people turn away from God, there is always a break-down in human relationships. The sin of Adam and Eve caused a rupture in the relationship between humanity and God. That sin of disobedience took humanity onto a path where it has been hard to resist temptation to do evil. The effect of the world’s first recorded murder – that is the murder of Abel at the hands of Cain – is at the very heart of every murder that has been contemplated and carried out in the history of humanity, including the court ordered murder of Therese Marie Schindler-Schiavo. What was stopping Michael Schiavo from handing over the care of Terri to her parents and siblings? Nothing, except for his over-inflated ego, and perhaps that guilty secret that he did not want a recovered Terri to reveal, should have prevented Michael Schiavo from doing what her parents wanted.

As I have continued to study the Scriptures, I have learned about the difference between darkness and light. I have learned that the sinner is the one who walks in darkness, because it is the sinner who has separated from God, and who no longer bathes in the light of His Grace. My own fascination for history has taught me that all of the great civilizations of this world have gone through a steady rise and then decline. It is during the time of decline that we see history repeating itself, over and over again – murder, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia of the disabled, euthanasia of girl infants, injustice, pagan practices, and the list of all of the signs of the decline in civilization continues.

My list is not by any stretch of the imagination, an exhaustive list of the evil practices of mankind at the moment when a civilization goes into decline, yet it serves to pin-point that one thing that every age has in common with another age. Whenever man turns away from God, thinking that he/she knows better than God, or even denying the existence of the One True God, as idol worship is encouraged, there is a common thread – with the stoking of the ego, man is more inclined to commit murder, as well as other sins that are offensive to God. This is at the very heart of the fight to kill or to save Therese Marie Schindler-Schiavo.

Whilst we do not know for certain what happened on the morning that Terri collapsed and ended up in a coma that caused her brain damage, there are some things that have emerged from the previous day that point the finger at an ego driven adulterous husband, as having something to do with her condition. Even his desire to totally do away with her, by obtaining court sanctioning of her death, has an element of ego attached – it is an element that cannot be ignored when all of the facts behind this case are researched. One thing is very certain, Michael Schiavo had a problem that needed to be treated by a psychiatrist, because the way in which he was dominating Terri prior to her death was in reality a “flag” or signal that this was a very troubled relationship. Perhaps it is a sign that Michael, who was probably already entering into adulterous relationships behind his wife’s back, was feeling guilty about his sin of betrayal. One cannot deny that Michael Schiavo had committed adultery because he was openly living with his concubine, Jodi Centonze, plus he had sexual relations with at least two other women prior to the time when he began to live with his concubine. It is merely speculation that perhaps there were other women in the life of Michael Schiavo. If this speculation is true, then that would partially explain why he began flying into rages at Terri, since he would have been projecting his guilt for wrong doing onto Terri. Regardless of when the adultery began, it is probable that Michael Schiavo had a very guilty conscience and he would not want Terri to remain alive in order to convict him of his guilt over his betrayal of her trust in him as a husband, or to convict of his guilt over the event that led to her collapse.

The guilt that I speak about at the base or human level is magnified when God comes into the picture. Not only is there a sin against the wife but there is also a sin against God. The ten commands that were given to Moses state:

“Thou shalt not commit adultery”.

This is an offence against both God and neighbour. It is a breaking of the marriage covenant, and that means that this adultery has also served to break the relationship between Michael Schiavo and God. So here we have the first step that comes from satisfying the call of the ego. The relationship with God is broken and as a result of the breaking of this relationship, Michael Schiavo’s conscience became clouded as he moved from one wrong doing into another, until ultimately he committed the most grievous offence of all – he pushed for the legally sanctioned murder of Terri because he could no longer stand to see her lying in bed in her brain-injured state, serving as a reminder that he had caused this situation.

However, the buck does not stop with Michael Schiavo because there are others who were complicit in the court sanctioned murder of Marie Therese Schindler-Schiavo. These are the people who have been pushing to bring about euthanasia on demand in the same way that abortion on demand has been forced upon the nations of the world. Unfortunately not all of the forces behind the court-sanctioned murder of Therese Marie Schindler-Schiavo have been revealed. We still do not know who helped to bank roll the legal fees of George Felos. Then there is the complicity of the bio-ethicists as well as the journalists within the mainstream media. Each is complicit in what they either taught in the schools, or what they wrote in the media.

When God called upon Isaiah to be a prophet, He warned of the injustices that were being perpetrated against the most defenceless in society, and in our modern age, Therese Marie Schindler-Schiavo is the face of the most vulnerable and defenceless within society today – those who cannot speak up for themselves because of a physical impairment caused by injury, or birth defect. Our modern society has made the plunge into oblivion, not only through the murder of the unborn, but by the sanctioning of the killing of those who cannot tell us what he or she really wants. This is the crux of the issue of the case of Schindler vs. Schiavo. Terri could not speak up for herself, and her guardian because of his guilt over his adultery should not have been allowed to kill her with the sanction of the court.

One year ago...Carla Sauer Iyer speaks up for Terri

Carla Sauer Iyer was prepared to speak out about what happened when she was a nurse at Palm Gardens nursing home where she had a role in caring for Terri Schindler-Schiavo, prior to Felos acting illegally and getting Terri admitted to Woodside Hospice where eventually Terri was murdered by her feckless, adulterous and wife abusing husband. One year on it is worth reading again the testimony of Carla, because it remains as an indictment against all of the people who turned their backs on Terri and the Schindlers in the pursuit of this woman's death in order to bring about euthanasia on demand.

There are many who claim that it is not true that Michael Schiavo is a wife abuser, well I beg to differ from such an opinion. There are several ways to abuse a person: physical, mental and sexual. Sometimes all three forms of abuse go hand in hand, but they are truly separate and distinct and I believe that at the very least Michael Schiavo is guilty of the mental or psychological abuse of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. Most people think that one must see signs of bruising or scratches, or welts from a strap or other implement to have proof of physical abuse, and again this is not true. It has been established that a large portion of the cases relating to women who have been physically abused by their spouses, or lovers, do not make it to court because the police who dealt with the cases did not know how to detect signs of attempted strangulation. Not all cases of attempted strangulation are obvious to the naked eye, for there are ways of attempting to strangle a person that leaves almost no markings. This is probably what happened in the Schiavo case.

However, there are other signs that indicate that the relationship between Michael Schiavo and his late wife Theresa Marie Schindler was one that was abusive. First, there is the evidence of one of Terri's friends and workmate, that Michael used to check the number of kilometres on the car. This kind of thing is a sure sign of an abusive husband, that is one who attempts to exert power over his wife in extraordinary ways. Second, this same person had remarked upon the fact that there were times when Terri came to work and her arms were covered in bruises. This is a point that was glossed over by the MSM who have flat out refused to look at this case as one that involved spousal abuse. Third, there is Michael's determination that his late wife must suffer from a tortuous death that he wished upon her, and something that was not her choice. This is the height of an abusive relationship, when one sees the projection of one's own thoughts and attitudes upon others.

Carla's testimony, even a year after I first read what she had to say about Michael Schiavo and the manner in which he dominated the care of this wife, remains an indictment against Michael Schiavo. Her testimony outlines yet another way in which Michael Schiavo continued to abuse his wife even though she was lying helplessly on a bed. His refusal to allow her to have therapy of any nature is an indictment against Schiavo. It is abusive because Terri was denied the opportunity to progress to the best of her potential after serious brain injury. Carla testifies that Michael Schiavo was menacing towards staff, including in his body language. He apparently did a lot of yelling at the staff in the nursing home, and a number of staff members were afraid of him. Even here, one can see this translated to the domestic front, where no doubt endured these slanging matches from a husband who definitely had some form of mental problem.

The worst form of abuse that Terri endured was the isolation from society that was forced upon her by the adulterous husband. The manner in which he controlled the visitors' list at the nursing homes, as wel as the hospice, including the refusal to allow Terri's own family to visit further enforces the proof that Michael Schiavo was a wife abuser, and as such he should have been prosecuted for the abuse of his wife.

Unfortunately, not one person who had the authority to act in this case was prepared to cooperate with the Schindlers in order to have Terri released from her daily terror that lasted 15 years. In the end, not only is Michael Schiavo liable for the court sanctioned murder of his wife, but all of those people who were complicit in the plot to make sure that Terri died so that they could push euthanasia on demand, are also liable for this woman's unnecessary death. Terri did not want to die, but her feelings were covered up because of the snow job and the mystique that surrounded her condition - a mystique that was created by a low life lawyer who should also be put in prison because of his role in pursuing Terri's death.

BBC NEWS | Health | Sick baby's family thanks judge

BBC NEWS | Health | Sick baby's family thanks judge

At last there is some positive news for families with severely disabled children. Baby MB has been given a reprieve in a ruling by Justice Holman in the UK. The judge has ruled that since the little boy can interact with his environment the medical team cannot switch off the ventilator due to "quality of life arguments.

This is a ruling that has acknowledge something that was denied to Terri Schiavo - that he can respond to outside stimulus and that he does have a quality of life albeit not the same as a normal toddler when it comes to taking first steps.

Quality of life arguments are designed to deny a person the right to go on living. In this case we can see what happens when a just judge reviews all of the facts that are placed before him.

Charlotte continues to improve

BBC NEWS England Hampshire Charlotte 'continuing to improve'


Each time that Justice Hedley has agreed with the doctors and has made a DNR order relating to Charlotte Wyatt, this brave little girl has shown that the judge and the doctors are not going to have the last say about whether she will live or die. Last week I reported that Charlotte's condition had deteriorated because of an infection. In yet another attempt to write off this little girl, the doctors at the hospital asked for an emegency decision from Justice Hedley that they be allowed to resurrect the DNR on this baby. The judge readily complied with the request. I can imagine that Charlotte's parents were heartbroken that once again they faced this same situation with their very brave little daughter.

Well, Charlotte has been showing these doctors that she is not finished with her life and that she is not going to die. Once again Charlotte has defied the doctors and she has begun improving. What will they try next to kill Charlotte?

Baby Life support case goes public :: :: Hyscience

Baby Life support goes public :: :: Hyscience

The case of baby MB is one of those heart wrenching cases where a 17 month old baby is being placed under a death sentence against the parents' wishes. This is another UK case where the doctors have to the courts asking that they be allowed to withdraw life support.

The case is only slightly different from Charlotte Wyatt's case. Both sets of parents want their babies to live but the doctors do not want to continue treatment. Baby MB is worse off than Charlotte because this poor little mite has a condition known as muscle atrophy that is leading to eventual paralysis. He need oxygen to survive and the doctors are making the request to stop the oxygen. The parents want their son to be given a tracheotomy so that they can take him home.

At issue in this case is once again who has the right to determine whether a severely disabled baby should live or die, based upon a very subjective view of life being: "quality of life". Who are these doctors that they think that they have the right to decide whether or not either Charlotte or Baby MB should live or die? They are not God, but they are attempting to play God, by going to the courts to ask permission to literally kill these babies because they do not measure up to their predetermined idea of a quality of life.

Life and Death: Judge Rules Doctors Must Let Baby Charlotte Die :: Life Issues :: Hyscience#more

Life and Death: Judge Rules Doctors Must Let Baby Charlotte Die :: Life Issues :: Hyscience#more

Baby Charlotte Wyatt has been condemned to death again by justice Hedley. This is a shocking situation, because the justice is playing God by allowing the refusal of life saving techniques to help Charlotte whilst she has an infection.

Haleigh is moved to rehabilitation

Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe that God answers our prayers in unexpected ways? Well, I definitely believe in God, even though I sometimes wonder why he does not seem to answer my requests. The positive changes in Haleigh Poutre's health serve as a reminder that miracles do happen.

It has only been a short time since the courts declared that Jason Strickland had no right to seek to have a say over Haleigh's welfare, a decision that left her fate in the hands of the Department of Social Services in Boston, and already Haleigh has been moved to a children's rehabilitation facility. The spokeswoman for Haleigh is Denise Monteiro, and I suspect that this woman really does give a damn about giving Haleigh a fighting chance to live a normal life.

On the day after the court decided that the Department had the ultimate say over Haleigh, the little girl started to stir. The good news happens to be that further opinions from other neurologists were sort (at least they did not use the quack Cranford) and as a result of the second opinion Haleigh was moved to the rehabilitation facility.

The department spokeswoman has also indicated that the DNR has been lifted and if anything should happen that Haleigh needs life saving treatment, she will receive that treatment. This is very good news. The child's life is no longer in the balance from the point of view that the department is no longer seeking to prematurely end Haleigh's life. Ms Monteiro has been adamant in stating that nutrition and hydration would not be withdrawn.

It seems that Haleigh has given positive responses to questions that have been put to her. She has been observed moving her eyes towards people's voices. Funny thing is Terri Schiavo was doing those things too, but in the cover up over Terri's condition, this positive evidence that she was progressing was ignored by those who were seeking to murder her.

I have to applaud Jason Strickland for making the legal attempt to prevent the authorities causing harm to Haleigh at a point in her life when she was so very vulnerable as far as living or dying is concerned. I do not applaud this man's other actions, but his legal move has saved Haleigh's young life for the time being.

I am feeling upbeat over this case because of the positive indications regarding Haleigh's progress towards coming out of her coma. My gut feel over the issue happens to be that I think that the medical profession has started to become too hasty in attempting to end the lives of people who present to the hospital in a coma condition. They need to slow down in making those life and death decisions. They need to learn to err on the side of life so that more people are given the opportunity to fully recover from their injuries.

Just for the record, in 1959 my family was involved in a near fatal car accident. My sister was in a coma and lay near death for 2 weeks. During that time a member of the family actually informed my mother that she was praying that my sister would die. Well, God answered the prayer in the negative. My sister came out of her coma. She has slight brain injury. In 1959 we did not have access to all of the fancy equipment that is available now. At that time no one attempted to end my sister's life just because she was in that state. She was given the opportunity to live and she continues to live today, as a mother of 4 daughters and a grandmother to many grandchildren.

It is wrong to attempt to end the life of someone just because he or she is in a coma. That person should have the chance to wake up and be rehabiliated. This is what is meant by the "Culture of Life".

Should left wing judges be allowed to decide?

In my last blog I mentioned the story of Maria Korp. Sadly, that case ended in Maria's death, and then her husband, who was the co-accused with regard to the injuries she received (the mistress did the bashing and left Maria for dead and then blamed Joe Korp) committed suicide.

In that case, Joe Korp was accused of having a vested interest in his wife remaining alive. I have no doubt that the accusation had weighed very heavily upon his fragile mind, and that somehow this had something to do with the finality of his decision-making. I am not excusing Joe Korp. I am not saying that he was totally innocent. He had a sexual and immaturity problem and he needed psychiatric help for that problem. However, I do think that the mistress was not necessarily telling the truth about what really happened. It was a very strange case.

The original reason for starting the blog had to do with Theresa Schindler-Schiavo who was a severely disabled woman who was being abused by her husband, and was forced to die via dehydration and starvation. Dehydration is an extremely unpleasant way to die, and what Terri endured at the end of her life should have been enough to have this man hurled before the criminal court on a count of murder. However, that has not happened to date. Terri's life was placed in jeopardy because of an activist judge - a man who has a vested interest in doing what the lawyers want him to do. Oh yes, Greer was given awards for his handling of this case, by the Clearwater Bar Association and other lawyers involved in yes, that is right, the Guardianship Association. That group went as far as giving an award to the spouse murderer claiming him as guardian of the year for 2005. Like pigs will fly if that man was a good guardian!!!!!!!

Now, there is a similar case in Boston, but this time, it is a child who is in danger of being put to death. Haleigh's case is a mixture of Maria Korp and Terri Schiavo and there is no easy way of knowing the full truth about the situation. In Maria's case we were told that her health was deteriorating but we were not given precise detail about exactly why this was the prognosis. Anyway, I doubt that Maria was left to feel the pain of having sustenance removed, but that is not something I want to discuss here. My subject is Haleigh Poutre, an 11 year old who ended up in hospital, and in a coma because someone bashed her to the point of senselessness. This is a peculiar case, because the birth mother had allowed a boyfriend to abuse and rape Haleigh when she was only 3 years old, and then she abandoned the child, leaving her with her sister (who is now dead), who adopted Haleigh, and then allowed her husband to bash Haleigh.(or at least that is what the media are stating). Jason Strickland is the alleged perpetrator of Haleigh's injuries, yet he is the only one who spoke up on her behalf.

Unfortunately, Jason Strickland, as the alleged perpetrator of the injuries, is seen as one who has a vested interest in keeping Haleigh alive. If she dies, then just like Joe Korp, he faces the possibility of having charges against him revised to that of murder. It is because of the perceived vested interest that the judge who heard the case refused to give Jason Strickland the right to determine what will happen to Haleigh. Her mother, who has come out of the woodwork had gone on record as stating that Haleigh should be allowed to die. So what does the female judge decide? That Jason Strickland, who wants the child to be given a chance, has such a vested interest in Haleigh remaining alive that his opinion does not count at all.

Why on earth are these people being appointed to the bench when they are only interested in killing people?