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Kasz216 on 13 August 2013
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dsgrue3 said:
 

It's as if you see my response, but fail repeatedly to actually read it. I bolded and underlined the key point so you can read it this time. You know, the part where it explicitly states they are UNRESPONSIVE.

I'm not sure if you realize this, but simply saying "it's illogical [bro]" is not a valid rebuttal. You need to support that position, which you've yet to do in any impactful regard.

Diagnostic criteria for the vegetative state (US Multi-Society Task Force on Persistent Vegetative State guidelines, 1994):

 

  • No evidence of awareness of self or environment and an inability to interact with others
  • No evidence of sustained, reproducible, purposeful, or voluntary behavioral responses to visual, auditory, tactile, or noxious stimuli
  • No evidence of language comprehension or expression
  • Presence of sleep-wake cycles
  • Sufficiently preserved hypothalamic and brainstem autonomic functions to permit survival with medical and nursing care
  • Bowel and bladder incontinence
  • Variably preserved cranial-nerve and spinal reflexes

 

Just from glancing at your source it doesn't seem relevant at all as it did not differentiate itself from vegetative and minimally conscious states...
"This small study looked at responses in 22 people who were in a vegetative or minimally conscious state."
Furthermore: 
"Similar responses were seen in people in a vegetative state and people in a minimally conscious state, and the test was not able to distinguish between these groups, incorrectly classifying two out of 11 people in the vegetative state and four out of nine non–vegetative state participants (an accuracy of 72.7%)."


Again you misread your own sentence you missed the part where it says most.  Rectangle vs Square.  People in a vegetative state DO react to stimuli. Meaning that this is not the criteria used to decide whether or not it's ethical to pull the plug.

 

Also you totally misread and misunderstood the study... I'm guessing you didn't actually read it and just tried to skim it to find something you thought supported your point.


The study took 3 groups of patients.  Those in Vegetative States, those in minimally consious states and those in severly disabled states.  In otherwords they did differentiate between these groups.

Those are three seperate kind of states.  They were already clasfied going into the study.

What the test did was play a loud noise before shooting air in someones eyes.  What it found was that people in a vegetative state could be conditioned to close their eyes before the air was blown into it. (reacting to stimuli)


So much so that some people in a vegetative state would even show up as MCS.   In otherwords.  The people in a vegetative state were responding.  What you took as a flaw, that the study couldn't tell them a part, was actually the reason i posted the article.  Some of the patients in the vegetative state were so responsive, they were as responsive as people NOT in vegetative states.

 

The point you seemed to gloss over... which is funny because it's a paragraph above what you copied.


"The researchers found that people in a vegetative state could learn to respond to the sound by blinking their eye more quickly to avoid the expected puff of air, similar to the response seen in the conscious control group, though not as strong. There was a stronger response to the tones linked to the puff of air than to the tones that were not, and this got stronger as time got closer to when the air puff was expected. The responses were not seen in conscious participants who were anaesthetised."

In otherwords, people in vegetative states are much closer to people in minimally altered states... then people knocked out with anestetics.


I mean... if your going to ask for sources, the least you could do is read them.