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One thing my new book focuses on is how poorly secularized medicine understands catastrophic brain injuries relative to their ability to make aggressively authoritative pronouncements about them.
If you haven't been following the science, prepare to have your mind blown...
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If you haven't been following the science, prepare to have your mind blown...
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Remember Terri Schiavo and "persistent vegetative state"? religious folks were offended by this phrase and largely choose to use other language. about two-decades later the secularized scientific community would change it from "persistent" to "chronic" 2/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31405394/
This was in part because of courageous research from Joe Fins (one of the giants of the secularized bioethics establishment) who found that patients in "PVS" had brains that could actually benefit from therapy, rewire themselves, and show consciousness. 3/ https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Come-Mind-Joseph-Fins/dp/0521715377
This is an absolutely massive, paradigm-shattering shift. We were told that Terri was gone. Her husband wrote on her gravestone that she "departed this earth" in 1990 when she had her catastrophic brain injury and was "at peace" in 2005 when she stopped getting food and water. 4/
A similar shift is also underway when it comes to "brain death." A new article published in the Journal of Neurological Sciences finds that some previously described as brain dead ought to be categorized in a new way: with "responsive unawake syndrome." 5/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341342736_Machado_C_Jahi_McMath_A_new_state_of_disorder_of_consciousness_J_Neurosurg_Sci_202165211-213DOI1023736S0390-56162004939-5
The article insists, however, that we should still keep the concept of brain death.
Mostly due to the authority of secularized medicine, after all, the idea that "brain death is actual death" is the law of the land in all 50 states...with religious exceptions in NY and NJ.
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Mostly due to the authority of secularized medicine, after all, the idea that "brain death is actual death" is the law of the land in all 50 states...with religious exceptions in NY and NJ.
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But consider just how aggressively authoritative the secularized medical establishment was in pronouncing Jahi McMath, the patient in the case prompting this new diagnostic category, dead. Despite the fact that she was entering puberty, she was even given a death certificate. 7/
David Durand, chief medical officer of the hospital where Jahi was admitted, condescendingly asked her skeptical family, “What is it that you don’t understand?” He then pounded his fist on the table, saying, “She’s dead, dead, dead.”
Nope.
She was alive, alive, alive.
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Nope.
She was alive, alive, alive.
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Jahi’s family, undeterred, managed to get care for her at St. Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ. But they learned from friendly nurses that the surgeon who performed Jahi's tracheotomy had been ostracized by his colleagues.
They asked, "You operated on that dead girl?"
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They asked, "You operated on that dead girl?"
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The reaction of the secularized US medical ethics camps was even worse. At times it was downright hostile. Arthur Caplan wrote, “Keeping her on a ventilator amounts to desecration of a body.” And, “You can’t really feed a corpse....She is going to start to decompose.” 10/
Laurence McCullough, a prominent medical ethicist from Cornell University, couldn’t believe that St. Peter’s Hospital even admitted Jahi in the first place. “What could they be thinking?” he told USA Today. “There is a word for this: crazy.”
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But despite these confident, supposedly authoritative pronouncements from those with power in the guilds, the science has now confirmed the skepticism of pro-life religious folks.
This indicates that much of what drove discussion of these cases was ideology, not science.
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This indicates that much of what drove discussion of these cases was ideology, not science.
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Fins (whose book I urge everyone to read) rightly connects hesitancy to publicly accept these findings with ideological commitments at the end of life--and even abortion rights. The existence of a category like "human non-person", after all, is essential to such commitments. 13/
But these latest scientific findings should encourage those on the side of fundamental human equality to be even more confident with our vision of justice in public discourse. The basis of our equal dignity comes from human nature itself bearing the image and likeness of God. 14/
But to be effective we must explicitly resist a secularized medical establishment with a very different vision of the good and who counts as equal.
And this is the central argument of my new book, out this July, and now available for preorder.
/fin https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Our-Dignity-Secularized-Undermining/dp/1565484711/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1620653315&refinements=p_27%3ACharles+C.+Camosy&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Charles+C.+Camosy
And this is the central argument of my new book, out this July, and now available for preorder.
/fin https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Our-Dignity-Secularized-Undermining/dp/1565484711/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1620653315&refinements=p_27%3ACharles+C.+Camosy&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Charles+C.+Camosy
