{"id":6034,"date":"2006-09-08T09:01:06","date_gmt":"2006-09-08T09:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/whats-going-on-in-there.html"},"modified":"2006-09-08T09:01:06","modified_gmt":"2006-09-08T09:01:06","slug":"whats-going-on-in-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/whats-going-on-in-there.html","title":{"rendered":"What’s going on in there?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The news is full of a story about researchers who tested a woman in a vegetative state and found some interesting responses:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The 23-year-old woman in the current study was injured in July 2005. Within weeks, she opened her eyes and began sleep-wake cycles \u2014 typical of patients in a vegetative state \u2014 but she showed no sign of awareness or ability to respond to her environment.<\/p>\n

A persistent vegetative state, in which the patient is awake but has no awareness of self or surroundings, is a state between coma and brain death. As many as 35,000 Americans are in such a state.<\/p>\n

Owen and his colleagues studied her brain for five months using functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. The technique highlights areas of the brain that receive increased blood flow when in use.<\/p>\n

When researchers spoke sentences to her, a specific part of the brain showed activity \u2014 the same part that lights up in healthy people hearing the same sentences. When the sentences included homonyms like "creek" and "creak," additional parts became active. Random noises generated no response.<\/p>\n

Finally, when they asked her to imagine playing tennis or wandering through her house, different areas of the brain were illuminated \u2014 again identical to the areas responding in healthy volunteers.<\/p>\n

Eleven months after the accident, the team reported, the woman began tracking a small mirror with her eyes, a sign that she might be transitioning to what is known as a minimally conscious state, often a sign of further recovery.<\/p>\n

Fins speculated that she had already begun undergoing this transition when the fMRI tests were conducted and that those tests simply detected it earlier than her behavior indicated. <\/p>\n

The researchers have refused to say what her current condition is.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Washington Post article<\/a><\/p>\n

That is good news, and indicative of the mysteries we are nowhere near to unpacking – but the moral point isn’t shifted by this: even if there is no <\/em>awareness, if a person is functioning, breathing on his or her own, etc, and needs food and water to be provided by others – we have no moral right to withhold that nutrition and hydration.<\/p>\n

(And let us try<\/em> not to fight old battles all over again. There are countless situations in which the dying <\/em>reject food, consciously or not – that is part of the process of dying <\/em>in many cases – in which, as life ebbs, all that a person can take is sips of water. That end-of-life scenario, which is part of the way dying can naturally occur. No one advocates force-feeding steak into people at the end of life who can’t swallow or whose bodies are shutting down. But when someone is not dying<\/em>, it is immoral to refuse to feed or give him water. There are innumerable gray areas, as well, but I think the fundamental point even precedes the question of nutrtion and hydration – when someone is profoundly cognitively disabled…what is our responsiblity to that person?)<\/p>\n

Wesley Smith comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The news is full of a story about researchers who tested a woman in a vegetative state and found some interesting responses: The 23-year-old woman in the current study was injured in July 2005. Within weeks, she opened her eyes and began sleep-wake cycles \u2014 typical of patients in a vegetative state \u2014 but she…<\/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-6034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat's going on in there? - 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\/2006\/09\/whats-going-on-in-there.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What's going on in there? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The news is full of a story about researchers who tested a woman in a vegetative state and found some interesting responses: The 23-year-old woman in the current study was injured in July 2005. 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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\/6034","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=6034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}