A patient who is in a vegetative state conveyed that he is not in pain.!
The Doctors seem to have interpreted the brain waves to arrive at this conclusion.
If this is correct, then the concept of Euthanasia in the case of Coma Patients need to have a re-look into, as these cases are recommended on the assumption that the Coma patients are in pain.
Photograph by: Miguel Alvarez , AFP/Getty Images
Story:
For more than a decade, Scott Routley has been living in a vegetative state.
He can’t talk. He can’t move. And although his eyes are open, no one is sure whether he can see.
But now, for the first time, doctors caring for the 39-year-old London, Ont., man say they know he’s not in pain.
And they learned it from Routley himself, by analyzing his brain waves when they asked him.
“This was a landmark moment for us because for the first time, a patient can actually tell us information, important information about how they’re feeling and their current situation,” said lead researcher Dr. Adrian Owen on Tuesday.
The medical breakthrough, believed to be the only time a severely brain injured patient has been able to relay clinically relevant information to their doctors, is being touted as a new way to possibly improve their quality of care.
Owen, who is the head of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario, says research published online last year in The Lancet shows that one in five of these patients are conscious, but essentially trapped in their bodies because they’re unable to communicate verbally or physically.
His team has been working for the past year trying to determine whether Routley, who became vegetative following a car crash 12 years ago, had any “residual brain activity” and how much he was able to understand them.
Last June, the doctors employed a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) to see if they would be able to analyze his brain patterns.
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