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Thursday, June 16, 2005

Is there a Doctor is the House.... or Senate?

Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a renowned heart surgeon before becoming Senate majority leader, argued that Florida doctors had erred in saying Terri Schiavo is in a “persistent vegetative state.”

“I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office,” he said in a lengthy speech in which he quoted medical texts and standards. “She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli.”

Sen. Frist wasn’t the only member of Congress with a medical degree to claim she was responding to visual stimuli. Here’s Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL):

“That woman is not in a vegetative state,” he said this week, challenging media reports that claimed she was. “She responds to verbal stimuli, she attempts to vocalize, she tracks with her eyes, she emotes, she attempts to kiss her father.”

“As a doctor,” Weldon said, “I would never pull her tube out.”

Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin concluded that…Terry Shivos brain was “profoundly atrophied” nearly half the size of a normal brain– and that the damage was “irreversable.” He also says, “The vision centers of her brain were dead” – meaning she was blind.

From Think Progress Blog Post 1 & Post 2


I don’t know which is worse having these guys as Senators or the prospect that they might re-enter the medical profession if they are not re-elected.


# posted by Jon Easton : 7:14 AM  2 comments
Comments:
It seems Dr.Frist failed in his video diagnosis of Ms. Schiavo.

Bill will have to go back to his real passion - kitty dissection. At least we know he'll never be elected president, thanks to his feline experimentations. Alex Cockburn calls him "Tennessee's answer to Dr. Mengele."
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 1:54 PM
 
What was even better was that he was on the Today show, maybe yesterday (?), with Senator Clinton, and when pushed about whehter he made a "diagnosis" on the floor of the Senate, he emphatically denied it. WTF? Saying that someone isn't in a persistent vegetative state isn't a diagnosis when coming from a doctor? What's even scarier is that someone that is so damn fundamentalist will be a doctor afterwards and was a doctor beforehand. What kind of advice was he giving to his patients? The patients that trusted him and were basing their healthcare decisions, decisions that could deal with life and death or at the ver least physical well being on that advice? BLAH.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 9:17 AM
 
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