June 25, 2007 at 11:19 am · Filed under Life, Meaning, & Selfhood + Politics
Caught a story through Digg about the ‘Most severly wounded’ soldier.
TAMPA, Florida: He lies flat, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling, tubes and machines feeding him, breathing for him, keeping him alive. He cannot walk or talk, but he can grimace and cry. And he is fully aware of what has happened to him.
Four years ago almost to this day, Joseph Briseno Jr. was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range in a Baghdad marketplace. His spinal cord was shattered, and cardiac arrests stole his vision and damaged his brain.
If he had just died, this story would have never made Digg. Many commenters are using it as a case against war or the state of medical coverage in our country. However, the real tragedy here is not the war or the inadequacy of veterans medical insurance. It’s more complicated.
He is no more a case against the war as the several who have died. Because of enhanced armor and field medicine we are saving more of our troops than ever before. This of course leaves many with horrible injuries yet still alive (the amount of brain trauma from this war is a big issue here). It’s really not surprising that this has happened.
If a lesson is here to be learned it is that our medical technology has advanced further than our ethics. We can keep people alive and even bring them back from death, but often leaving the patient even worse off because of oxygen deprivation. In this case, the soldier is not only paralyzed but blind and has brain damage because of the cardiac arrests that they saved him from.
Resuscitation has a success rate anywhere from 1-30% depending on the celerity and skillfulness of the response. Though even when people do survive many die shortly afterwards or suffer permanent damage to their brain and body. Until we can protect against oxygen deprivation or fuse spinal cords we need to rethink emergency resuscitation and our attitude of “save at all costs.”
April 12, 2007 at 9:03 pm · Filed under Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Fetal & Pediatric Medicine
The next time I read anyone saying that “autism is not a disorder but simply a different way of being,” and using the stupid label neurodiversity (or worse, the reverse term neurotypical), I’m pointing them to this study:
Autism Costs Society An Estimated $3 Million Per Patient, According To Report
Each individual with autism accrues about $3.2 million in costs to society over his or her lifetime, with lost productivity and adult care being the most expensive components, according to a report in the April issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, a theme issue on autism spectrum disorders.
read the rest of the article at Science Daily
Sure we should treat autistics like human beings rather than broken misfit toys to be fixed. That goes without saying really. As does the idea that autistics should be supported in a manner that best supports their mindset.
Cure = Genocide!?!
There is no way to cure autism once it is set in, and I doubt we’ll ever find a cure that works that way. However, there may be hope to tackle it earlier through gene therapy or other means during the fetal development process. Some of the anti-cure zealots of the Autism rights movement refer to this form of prevention as genocide.
Now where they do have a bit of a point is when we only have the technology for prenatal diagnosis but not treatment. In this situation the mother is given only the options of either going forward with the pregnancy or termination. this is the scenario put forth by the reactionary people behind the The Autistic Genocide Clock.
Of course all this assumes that all our diagnosis tests are really accurate and highly predictive, which is a BIG if; usually the level of prognostication is low unless it’s a blatant physical defect. Most likely the parents will be told something like: “The test results show that your fetus has a XX% chance of developing autism. This is not a guarantee that your child will have autism and we don’t know where on the spectrum of autism your child will be. It could be mild or it could be severe” After, this it’s up to the mother.
It’s not good news to be sure, and some mothers will terminate out of fear for the worst. However, even if it’s at the mild end of the spectrum it still requires a lot of support both emotionally, physically, and financially, which some mothers may feel they couldn’t handle. Even in this situation it is the mother’s choice; just like when it’s the mother’s choice when she doesn’t feel she could handle a “normal” baby. It’s really not that much different.
