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The International Congress on "Life-Sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas,." 17-20 March 2004, which the Pope was addressing, was attended on behalf of the Doctors' Federation by Dr. Jacqueline Laing, D.Phil., Senior Lecturer in Law at London Metropolitan University. In her report she says: "Of particular relevance to the position of the United Kingdom was the lecture by Dr. Keith Andrews, Director of the Institute of Complex Neuro-Disability, London, U.K. It was he who demonstrated in an important article published in the B.M.J. in 1996 the high rate (over 40%) of misdiagnosis of PVS. "In the course of the seminar entitled 'Practical Dilemmas of Treatment Decisions: Withholding or Withdrawing Treatment - from a Clinician's Point of View'. Dr. Andrews drew heavily upon the highly criticized decision of the UK.'s House of Lords in Airedale NHS Trust v. Bland 1993). 1 ALL ER 821. He described the business of removing nutrition and hydration from patients diagnosed in a PVS, applying the dubious reasoning in Bland that it would and could be in the best interests of non-consenting patients who are not dying at all to be deprived of sustenance. "What was disturbing about the Bland decision and what attracted strenuous opposition from critics was that it marked an important shift in legal reasoning of the courts. Instead of considering the futility of the treatment, the burden of the treatment, the expense of treatment, the decision was for the first time considering the worthwhileness of the patient and the burdensomeness of the patient himself."
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