Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

It's now pretty dated in some ways, given that the autopsy has come out, and the brain damage was established to be extreme. This portion of the piece is very misleading:

"Some doctors and bioethicists with interests in the matter suggested that, as a conservative Christian, Dr. Cheshire brought a bias to the case, but his affidavit seemed to raise questions not before widely addressed. He noted that the patient had not had a complete neurological examination in nearly three years, had never had such advanced testing as positron emission tomography (PET) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and that in the absence of such examination and imaging there remained "huge uncertainties" about her neurological status."

There were no uncertainties about the neurological status (to the extent that anything medical has certainty). Every single clinical test was consistent with massive brain damage. There was no fMRI because she had an implant - that's NOT an issue which was unaddressed. The earlier scans were also definitive, again, to a certainty as much as one can ever get.

The writer is playing with some facts in order to make a better on-one-side-on-the-other-side story.

It's a heartwrenching tale, but sometimes there aren't two sides to science (or medicine).

Best coverage I've seen has been on http://abstractappeal.com/