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“When you have signs of consciousness, you cannot decide to stop hydration and nutrition,’ said Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liège and co-author of the study which appears in the journal Science Today” (Guardian, 8 Sept 06).
A woman injured in an accident was studied five months later. “Neuroscientists at the Medical Research Council’s cognition and brain sciences unit at Cambridge and the University of Liège in Belgium used a brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect signs of awareness in the woman, the first time scientists have been able to do so in a PVS patient. The technique is now likely to become a standard way of determining how conscious vegetative patients are. ‘This is extremely important. It’s the difference between life and death,’ said Dr. Laureys.’
Wesley Smith’s blog records that Dr. Owen, co-author of this study, told the woman to “perform a mental task, to imagine herself playing tennis and walking through her house. Motor-control regions of her brain lit up like they did in the healthy people he compared with her.
“These were the kinds of tests that the Schindlers begged Judge Greer to permit to be given to Terri Schiavo, in the hope that a scan which measured function would demonstrate more activity than tests that had been done measuring brain structure.” Although Dr. Owen’s sophisticated tests would not have been possible, a PET scan could have been done. Judge Greer refused to allow it.
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