Dangerous: it could just as easily be used to impede the use of donated bodies to medical schools for anatomy classes.
Wait, what? Dolanis now an attorney?
shudder
I wonder if less damage would have been done if it were the fictional Dolan, though…
I disagree about the suffering part, she may not be cognitively suffering, however her body will slowly deteriorate, she will get infections on top of infections, bedsores, suffer multi-system organ failure. When her kidneys give out are we going to put her on dialysis?
This young girl is dead, providing all this care and extraordinary measures to keep a body in existence is insane and frankly unethical. When will the line be drawn? I feel for her parents, and cannot imagine the lost of child, the pain must be horrific. For me to know my child is technically dead and machines were just keeping his body in existence would be, for me, a greater suffering.
The law has clearly stated brain death is death, to keep providing costly medical care and resources to a corpse is criminal and a misuse of those limited resources, in my opinion. What is the goal here? She will never be restored to the fun loving young lady she was before. She will never be able to interact in any meaningful way with her family. All that is left of her is the vessel that contain her mind, spirit and soul. Jahi has been gone since December. For any medical profession to provide this family with any hope this young lady can be restored to health is truly providing unethical care.
The sad truth is she will waste away in her hospital bed, until some secondary infection or something stops her heart.
A parent’s love is unconditional, we would do anything in our power to protective and save our children. Jahi parents have fought fiercely for their daughter, but it is time to concede and let their daughter rest in peace.
I know this is a zombie (ha!) but I did some quick research, and CBS is reporting that she hasn’t liquified, and is in the ICU at St. Peter’s Children’s Hospital in New Jersey.
Even leaving aside the family’s reports of responding to voices and such, is this possible?
As an aside, for those wondering about her siblings - per another recent interview with the mother, looks like mom has moved away from her other kids (apparently to New Jersey), left them with relatives, and does a constant vigil with Jahi. She says the only book there, and the only thing she does there, is to read the Bible.
Confusion over the difference between coma and brain death persists among many people in the general populace.
According to the article, the hospital won’t confirm Jahi’s presence, and the family’s attorney won’t say where she is. The news report doesn’t say how they know Jahi is in this hospital. It’s possible that Jahi was never there at all.
Also, a minor nit: it’s not CBS who is saying this. It’s KPIX, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco.
Hard to say, there aren’t many cases where we’ve attempted to keep a dead person’s body in such a state for so long, and our medical technology is really good at maintaining stasis in some cases. But short of someone other than the family/lawyer witnessing this supposed “improvement” or even “lack of decay,” Occam’s Razor would suggest that the family is simply as desperate to believe as they’ve been throughout this ordeal.
I’m not a medical expert but from the expert opinions of doctors I remember reading at the time, it does seem impossible that her body hasn’t begun to significantly decay by now.
I admit a certain (literally, I guess) morbid curiosity in her current condition and rate of change.
I’d be surprised if the girl is still alive. Not because people in vegetative states can’t continue to ‘live’ for some time but because I thought one of the doctor reports said she was sloughing off the lining of her intestines, amongst other things- lack of bowels sounds or bowel movements, inability to regulate temperature.
Either the doctor was wrong, or the child is a rare exception to normal expectations.
Here is the old medical report from January: http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_24855412/document-medical-analysis-jahi-mcmath-deteriorating-condition?source=pkg
The most recent story from that link said the family wanted to move her from California to New Jersey in June of this year. That old medical report from January said she would suffer precipitous drops in her blood pressure when moved for routine care.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/girls-family-seeks-reversal-brain-death-ruling-25931059
So I guess the family is trying to get the brain-death ruling overturned. Claim they have some sort of evidence of brain function.
So what’s the Straight Dope? Is she really brain dead? If so, our resident experts have been incorrect about her level of bodily degradation to this point.
I thought that there had been other cases of keeping brain dead persons alive (typically pregnant mothers, using the functions they can keep functioning in the mother’s dead body ongoing until the fetus is viable and can be removed via c-section) for some months. It was my understanding the inevitable decay functions that happen when you have true brain death are because of the imperfect techniques used to keep the rest of the bodies systems somewhat working in absence of a brain, but that “for a time” (which is vaguely defined because for obvious reasons doctors haven’t regularly tested this) you could keep the body in “okay” shape through various interventions. It’s just that eventually those interventions will not work so well and you get runaway failures of the organ systems you’re keeping functional and typically out of control infections as bacteria consume the corpse etc. But the time you can keep that from happening isn’t set in stone, and in theory if they do a really, really good job at keeping the body’s temperature right, its organs functioning etc they can essentially keep the corpse alive as a “biological machine” indefinitely. It’s just that experience suggests there is eventually going to be a point where this fails.
So the fact that she’s still around doesn’t mean that the original diagnosis had to be wrong or that something is different than expected about her body. It could just mean so far they’ve done a good job keeping her organs functional lacking a central nervous system. Something that is known to have been possible before, but not frequently done, and also known to always eventually fail. But “eventually” is a flexible term.
The article cites the “International Brain Research Foundation,” which I’m unfamiliar with, but cursory searches on their organization began to set off my woo alarms. Here’s one example.
It also mentions something called “nutraceuticals” as a component of their treatments… so yeah. I remain skeptical about any facts presented by the family.
I wonder if she skips the part about the sodomy and the concubine orgies
The chief executive officer of the IBRF is Philip DeFina. The website of the IBRF (which is trying to raise $$$ for its autism research based on three anecdotal reports of supposed success with autistic children), describes DeFina treating an autistic child:
“On April 1, her son, after having his brain mapped in March, began taking FDA approved medications in very unique combinations, as prescribed by Philip A. DeFina, a neuropsychologist who lives in Chester Township. Now, she sees a big change in her son’s behavior and self-esteem: He no longer screams, pulls hair or bites at school, she said, and he seems much happier.”
One wonders what the justification was for using these “very unique combinations of drugs”. DeFina (who is not an M.D.) is also the guy who was going to put autistic kids in hyperbaric oxygen chambers until the sponsoring hospital had second thoughts.
Yes, I am also getting serious woo vibes from the IBRF. But maybe that indicates my lack of “synergy”. :dubious:
It isn’t any old “unique combination of drugs” but a “very unique combination of drugs.” That makes a difference.
This whole situation is just so sad and grotesque. Her poor family has been misled, told what they want to hear, seeing what they want to see, and it’s pretty awful all around.
She’s gone. Time to let her go.
I’ve been curious about this case, so I Googled for updates. If anything, this story is even stranger than it was a year ago.
The family’s attorney has been making noises about trying to get the death certificate rescinded.
http://news.yahoo.com/jahi-mcmath-still-hooked-machines-1-later-065014724.html