Doctors missing consciousness in vegetative patients
12:47 21 July 2009 by Celeste Biever
If there's one thing worse than being in a coma, it's people thinking you are in one when you aren't. Yet a new comparison of methods for detecting consciousness suggests that around 40 per cent of people diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are in fact "minimally conscious".
In the worst case scenario, such misdiagnoses could influence the decision to allow a patient to die, even though they have some vestiges of consciousness. But crucially it may deprive patients of treatments to make them more comfortable, more likely to recover, or to allow them to communicate with family, say researchers.
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"We may have become much too comfortable about our ability to detect consciousness," concludes Giacino. "I think it's appropriate for there to be some level of alarm about this."
Ya think???
Just because you don't feel good about dehydrating someone to death who may
know it's happening and feel the agony?
