We had one lecture called "Frontiers in Medicine", or something like that, and it was about the future of medicine and research.
Like 40% of my year I was going to skip it and get home early, but being the nerd that I am I couldn't bear to miss it, and good thing too! Because it was actually pretty interesting for general knowledge sake!
The guy giving the lecture did neuroscience research into Persistent Vegetative State (PVS).
PVS is (as defined by wikipedia):
PVS is a condition of patients with severe brain damage in whom coma has progressed to a state of wakefulness without detectable awarenes
So that basically means someone who has had a serious brain injury, and they are in a coma, but with their eyes open, and they have normal sleep-wake cycles, but show no evidence of being aware of anything around them
(like Terri Schiavo, for who remembers her from a few years ago)
So this guy's research team has done a lot of research into the brains of patients in PVS.
They do tests called "functional MRI" which are special brain scans which light-up different areas of the brain, when those areas become activated....
So for example, a different area of the brain would light up when someone wiggles their fingers, and when they whistle, and when they dream of being on a sandy beach, and when they are scared, or happy...etc
It's a way of seeing what part of the brain is involved in different activities
So what they did was ask a group of normal people to perform certain tasks and they scanned their brains, and then they said the same things to people in a PVS and scanned their brains....and they compared which areas of the brain light up in these 2 groups..
So they discovered that..
* When patients in PVS are shown photos of their family, friends and childhood scenes, the exact same areas of "memory and recognition" light up in their brain...the same as in normal people
* When patients in a PVS are told to imagine themselves playing tennis, or to imagine walking around their house, the same areas involved in "imagination and preparing for movement" light-up in their brain...the same as in normal people
The researchers aren't totally sure what to make of this data, and whether this means that patients in a PVS actually *are* aware on some level of what is going on, but aren't conscious of being aware...or what...
but they have made recommendations that these patients be given pain killers for any treatments they have, just like normal people, as it is wrong to assume that they are completely unaware of what is going on around them, and they may indeed feel pain like anyone else.
This makes me think of the law in England which allows withdrawing food and fluids from these sorts of patients, and allowing them to starve and dehydrate to death over a period of about 2 weeks, which I find exceptionally cruel (like what happened to Terri Schiavo in the USA).
This sort of death would be agonizingly painful for anyone, but people deny that such patients would feel any pain....well....they may be wrong.
on a related note...is it just me, or does anyone else quite dislike the term 'vegetative'?! Does it come from "like a vegetable" ? Isn't that a bit of a horrible choice of description for a human being?!
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2 comments:
Only problem is if you never had a normal brain to start with! Yikes!
Terri Shiavo will do a great deal of good in the world one day. Her brother fights tirelessly for the right to life of all vulnerable people.
Because of my neurological problems I sometimes wonder what the future holds.
All things in God's hands.
It is fascinating that people in this state (I hate the term vegitative when talking about a person) show such awareness. It makes me wonder if the state is more similar to catatonia than has been thought.
Have you ever read Awakenings by Oliver Sachs?(I think that was his name) They made a film of it too.
I nursed someone with a drug induced catatonic state once. He recovered well-I didn't see him well. I wonder what he remembered.
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