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from the pathway-to-freedom-or-fate-worse-than-death? dept.
Surgery to embed a nerve-stimulating implant in a patient in a persistent vegetative state (15 years), resulted in the patient reverting to a "minimally conscious" state.
After lying in a vegetative state for 15 years, a 35-year-old male patient in France appears to have regained minimal consciousness following months of vagus nerve stimulation, researchers report today in Current Biology.
The patient, who suffered severe brain damage in a car crash, had shown no signs of awareness or improvement before. He made no apparent purposeful movements and didn't respond to doctors or family at his bedside. But after researchers surgically implanted a device that stimulates the vagus nerve, quiet areas of his brain began to perk up—as did he.
His eyes turned toward people talking and could follow a moving mirror. He turned his head to follow a speaker moving around his bed. He slowly shook his head when asked. When researchers suddenly drew very close to his face, his eyes widened as if he was surprised or scared. When caregivers played his favorite music, he smiled and shed a tear.
Note that "respond" is on the level of "turning his head when asked, though that took a minute."
A few thoughts on this:
- Medical advances are COOL!
- Hopefully, this advance can help some folks.
- This makes ethical questions concerning patients in persistent vegetative states more urgent:
- (e.g. the question of whether/when to pull the plug has become even more confusing)
- This introduces some new ethical questions:
- Is it ethical to "bring back" someone after 15 years? (the world has changed quite significantly)
- Is it ethical to "bring back" someone to a state where they're might just barely be conscious enough to realise how much their state sucks?
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:25PM (6 children)
what is this slashpoop you're talking about?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:31PM (5 children)
Slashdot [slashdot.org] is a website that has many of the same stories as this site, except they publish these stories a day or two earlier than they're published here.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:37PM (1 child)
LOL! That "-1, Troll" mod is really a "-1, Painful Truth" mod!
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:40PM
LOL! That "-1, Troll" mod is really a "-1, Painful Truth" mod!
True. However, once you read the comments there your brain requires that nerve implant to regain minimal consciousness.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:29PM (1 child)
We can and have beat Slashdot to stories. It just doesn't happen often since we get less submissions and space them out longer (typically 90 minutes instead of 45 minutes)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @12:18AM
I like that our stories are later as we sometimes have better details by then.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday September 26 2017, @10:32PM
The timing is meaningless to me, and is a barb thrown that makes no sense. The state of journalism today?
All of the above being run by executive shitheads that treat us like an audience, while peddling us to their real customers, Big Ad. For me, all that exists is SoylentNews. Sometimes I fire up Tails and try to view other sites, but they're all broke as a mother fucker. You can view The Verge somewhat, and the Huffington Post actually gets top marks for displaying articles well without JS. CNN is a pile of shit, and most local news outlets render horribly through any kind of proxy that removes javascript as well as other bullshit. The user experience is extremely poor on those sites.
Whereas this site is:
I wonder why I keep coming back.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.