Michael Egnor writes at the Discovery Institute:
Dr. Novella and I see things quite differently. I am a neurosurgeon, and I believe that the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state, in Ms. Schiavo’s case specifically and in other cases more generally, is of dubious validity. “Persistent vegetative state,” defined succinctly but accurately, is the denial of subjective experience in a brain-damaged human being. PVS is the medical assertion that a human being is an object, but not a subject.
PVS is the only modern medical diagnosis that denies the personhood of a patient, and thus is fraught with logical and ethical problems. Furthermore, patients diagnosed with PVS are precisely those patients in whom discernment of awareness is most unreliable. We can never directly apprehend the thoughts of other people; we infer the thoughts of others only by their behavior. Patients with severe brain damage are precisely those people in whom expression of behavior is most impaired and in whom diagnoses based on assessment of behavior are most unreliable.
