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Originally Posted by RangerDick
I think prognosis is the common theme in these two cases.
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True, but the analogy fails because the
diagnoses were radically different.
If
prognosis becomes the basis for comparison, we open the debate to every bad prediction made by any doctor; or maybe we'll limit it to inaccurate predictions in regards to recovery from brain disorders.
My wife spoke with her father last night, who has in the past expressed a desire to not have life-sustaining measures taken in the event of a catastrophe, to see whether he would contradict his past expressions on the matter to retain what is evidently becoming a party line.
His response to this apparent contradiction was that he is opposed to being hooked up to a breathing apparatus, whereas Mrs. Shiavo is able to breath on her own. There must be other details in his living will, because that seems to be an extremely arbitrary disctinction on the face of it.
Now, the idea that someone without a functioning, indeed with liquified portions, brain who can breath on her own is disctinct from, and a more highly valued life, than a person with a functioning brain but who's lungs aren't working is bizarre to me.
I think that opinion really brings to light the notion that to, at least some, members of the christian coalition the body/soul is a mystical object that can not be and is not understood by modern scientists.
This disdain of science among such members percolates into every aspect of the secular world and becomes oppositional to major scientific understandings of humanity: spanning (pro)creation to death.
This latest story, where you accurately depicted the critical difference between 3 months and 15 years, is an attempt to ramp up emotional appeal that doctors are fallable. Therefore, according to this logic, the doctors could be fallable and one ought to "error on the side of life." Unless I'm using this incorrectly, I think it's a non-sequitar. The diagnoses might appear to have been similar, which isn't surprising since the symptoms appear the same--but the causes for the symptom are radically different.