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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 26 2017, @01:57PM   Printer-friendly
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?

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:22AM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:22AM (#573646)

    It was a pretty dark and depressing movie, but the one thing I didn't get was why the kids, after finding out there was no legal way to avoid organ-harvesting after investigating some rumor they heard about it, simply gave in and reported to be harvested as ordered. They weren't prisoners; they could drive around as they pleased and lived somewhat independently. They didn't seem to have much of a survival instinct.

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  • (Score: 2) by darnkitten on Sunday October 01 2017, @02:06AM

    by darnkitten (1912) on Sunday October 01 2017, @02:06AM (#575446)

    Part of it, at least in the novel, was that their "society/culture" was engineered by the powers-that-be to give them a sense of responsibility to each other, e.g. the younger ones cared for the older ones (who had cared for the younger ones as children) who were being actively harvested; also, the hope of being set free if they were "good enough" or "fell in love" kept them from rebelling, as it held out a (nonexistent) reward for not rebelling, similar to the way slaves were kept in check with rumours of occasional freeings coupled with the promise of rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

    They were also kept isolated enough from the rest of society that they would appear "different" and thus easier to track down if they did attempt escape.

    Mostly, though, I think, it comes from being a postwar British-designed society with postwar British attitudes in a British novel--Stiff Upper Lip, Keep Calm and Carry On, Respect Authority, and all that. Winston and Julia in 1984 could have resisted hard enough to be killed, but didn't.