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I don't know, and frankly, I think it's a rather pointless debate.
They most certainly will not put homicide, suicide or whatever on her death certificate. That is in by no way the manner in which she was put in this position.
The closest to any of those if they were even remotely true would be suicide. No one put a gun to her head and made her throw up her dinner.
I don't know, and frankly, I think it's a rather pointless debate.
She's not dying because she had bulimia. She's dying of starvation - induced by someone other than herself. That's homicide.
But she put herself into this state by being bulimic.
Yes, and a lot of people put themselves into the hospital by their own actions. However, when it takes the act of another person for you to die, it's homicide.
Natural causes, homicide, suicide and accidental are not the only causes listed on death certificates.
What about "complications due to pneumonia", "cancer", "heart attack", etc. Those are not any of the above. Probably when she dies it will be "complications resulting from bulimia"or something like that. If someone has lung cancer and is being kept alive by a respirator, then the family takes them off, it's not listed as "homicide"'; it's listed as "lung cancer". This is the same thing.
Natural causes, homicide, suicide, and accidental (trauma) are the major classifications of causes of death. Everything else falls into one of those categories.
There is a difference between sustaining life and maintaining life. And, the argument isn't really about the difference between mechanisms of keeping people alive.
Christopher Reeve's life was maintained by a respirator. Would you advocate unplugging him? Of course not. Because, he was able to express that he had a level of awareness which was discernible. There are many people who's lives are sustained by feeding tubes as well. Most are able to lead productive lives without many people noticing they are being sustained by artificial means. Should we unplug them? Even sillier, I would imagine, than unplugging Christopher Reeves.
So, what's the difference with Mrs. Schiavo? She's not able to express herself in a way that is discernible and certain.
So, we have opposing sides arguing over whether she should be sustained or killed. The killers have won the argument.
your argument has so many holes in it im not even going to bother addressing them all <sigh>
You're not even going to bother addressing one.
Fine by me.
If Christopher Reeves would have wanted to stop using that respirator, that would have been his right, correct?
Here's the affidavit of Dr. William Cheshire, Jr., the neurologist assigned by the Florida Adult Protection agency when they were called to intervene a few weeks back:
William Cheshire, Jr.
A couple of quotes from the affidavit:
I recommend you read the rest of his affidavit to see how Mrs. Schiavo's condition differs from that of a person that is truly in a "persistent vegetative state."
So then, the issue is not what state Mrs. Schiavo is in, but the intent, correct?
Superman can do as he well pleases.
Interesting.The neurologist, William Cheshire of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, is a bioethicist who is also an active member in Christian organizations, including two whose leaders have spoken out against the tube's removal.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlates...888083,00.html
Yeah, her intent. And, the recollection of one statement made long before she entered her current state and even longer before the ONLY person to have "heard" it bothered to bring it up doesn't wash. Even if he was able to bamboozle the courts.
Yes. Very...
What does that have to do with his affidavit?
Pretty much everything.
.
In your partisan world...maybe.
I notice they don't name the Christian organizations or the leaders.
He could be Catholic...and well, there are plenty of Catholics that disagree with their leader on this one.
I trust the Guardian as much as the NY Times.
Or perhaps his.
What Christian organizations are we speaking of?
It would be nice to know, I agree.
Yeah, well it's how the liberally-biased media gets people like you to trash professionals like Dr. Cheshire.
Get your facts before you decide he's a partisan hack.
A Diagnosis With a Dose of Religion
By JOHN SCHWARTZ and DENISE GRADY
Published: March 24, 2005
William P. Cheshire Jr., the Florida doctor cited by Gov. Jeb Bush yesterday in his announcement that he would intervene again in the case of Terri Schiavo, is a neurologist and bioethicist whose life and work have been guided by his religious beliefs.
Dr. Cheshire directs a laboratory at the Mayo Clinic branch in Jacksonville dealing with unconscious reflexes like digestion, and he is director of biotech ethics at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, a nonprofit group founded by "more than a dozen leading Christian bioethicists," in the words of its Web site.
In an article last year in Physician magazine, published by the evangelical group Focus on the Family, Dr. Cheshire, 44, said doctors are too quick to declare that a patient is in a persistent vegetative state.
"I'm not sure the diagnosis is used consistently," he told Physician. "I am sometimes asked if a patient is in P.V.S., but it's only been a few days. By definition, you have to wait at least a month."
Yesterday, in an affidavit supporting a pe ion by the Florida Department of Children and Families in the case, Dr. Cheshire said it was more likely that Ms. Schiavo was in a "minimally conscious state."
"Although Terri did not demonstrate during our 90-minute visit compelling evidence of verbalization, conscious awareness or volitional behavior," he wrote, "yet the visitor has the distinct sense of the presence of a living human being who seems at some level to be aware of some things around her."
Mr. Bush called Dr. Cheshire a "renowned neurologist," but he is not widely known in the neurology or bioethics fields. Asked about him, Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, replied, "Who?"
Dr. Cheshire, who graduated from Princeton and earned a medical degree at West Virginia University, did not return calls to the Mayo Clinic seeking comment. The clinic said in a statement that his work on the Schiavo case was not related to his work at the clinic and that the state had invited his opinion. "He observed the patient at her bedside and conducted an extensive review of her medical history but did not conduct an examination," the statement said.
Dr. Caplan said that was not good enough. "There is just no excuse for going in and making any pronouncement about the state that Terri Schiavo is in unless you're going to go in and do some form of technologically mediated scanning that would overturn what's on the record already," he said.
Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurologist and medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School who has examined Ms. Schiavo on behalf of the Florida courts and declared her to be irredeemably brain-damaged, said, "I have no idea who this Cheshire is," and added: "He has to be bogus, a pro-life fanatic. You'll not find any credible neurologist or neurosurgeon to get involved at this point and say she's not vegetative."
He said there was no doubt that Ms. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. "Her CAT scan shows massive shrinkage of the brain," he said. "Her EEG is flat - flat. There's no electrical activity coming from her brain."
Dr. Cheshire entered the field of bioethics relatively late in his career. A profile of him on the Web site of Trinity International University, where he enrolled in the master's program in bioethics in 2000, states that he was "searching for how he should integrate his faith with his medical career." After getting the degree, he became an adjunct professor of bioethics there.
A search of his publication record in the online medical library PubMed yielded articles in medical journals, with a focus on headache pain, in particular trigeminal neuralgia, a painful disorder originating in a cranial nerve called the trigeminal. None of the papers dealt with persistent vegetative states.
His papers show a fondness for puns, as in the le of a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine about a patient whose fillings caused an electrical current that made her condition worse: "The shocking tooth about trigeminal neuralgia."
He was also the author, with others from the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, of a paper opposing stem cell research.
The center's Web site notes that he and his wife and four children are members of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Jacksonville and that he has done medical missionary work in Honduras and Siberia.
He has also written poetry, including "Exit Ramp," a poem about the movement to allow physician-assisted suicide that uses the metaphor of a highway off-ramp to warn of a different kind of slippery slope:
Such killing fast degenerates,
Despite concern for patients' best,
Into a plot that terminates
Without explicit prerequest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/na.../24doctor.html
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Hmmm.....
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