{"id":4836,"date":"2005-07-25T13:42:34","date_gmt":"2005-07-25T13:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/nice-try.html"},"modified":"2005-07-25T13:42:34","modified_gmt":"2005-07-25T13:42:34","slug":"nice-try","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/nice-try.html","title":{"rendered":"Nice try"},"content":{"rendered":"

Letter-writers to the NYReview of Books attempt to tell Joan Didion she was wrong about Terri Schiavo. No luck.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

I am puzzled by Dr. Fins’s repeated assertion that I referred to him "out of context." I am also puzzled by his statement that he was talking about "the risk of misdiagnosis in patients who, unlike Ms. Schiavo, were not the object of heightened clinical scrutiny." Mrs. Schiavo was not the object of heightened clinical scrutiny. She was the object instead of heightened legal scrutiny. Until her death and subsequent autopsy she had not had a complete neurological examination in almost three years. She had never had a PET scan or an fMRI. The same New York Times<\/em> piece quotes a professor of neurology at Dartmouth, Dr. James Bernat, who told the Times<\/em> that "findings from studies like these would be relevant to cases like that of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman with brain damage who has been kept alive for years against her husband’s wishes. In that case…a brain-imaging test \u2014once it has been standardized\u2014could help determine whether brain damage has extinguished awareness." <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The original piece<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Letter-writers to the NYReview of Books attempt to tell Joan Didion she was wrong about Terri Schiavo. No luck. I am puzzled by Dr. Fins’s repeated assertion that I referred to him "out of context." I am also puzzled by his statement that he was talking about "the risk of misdiagnosis in patients who, unlike…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nNice try - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/nice-try.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nice try - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Letter-writers to the NYReview of Books attempt to tell Joan Didion she was wrong about Terri Schiavo. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}