The Human Rorschach Test

An insightful article on the Schiavo case: [O]ne would think that the certainty of her diagnosis would be the least open to interpretation. One would be wrong. When it comes to understanding the workings of the human mind, the state of the art of modern medicine is just that -- more art than science. The diagnosis of a persistent vegetative state is a clinical diagnosis. That is, it's based on a doctor's interpretation of signs and symptoms rather than any objectively measurable test results. ... In the few, limited studies that have addressed the issue, the rate of misdiagnosis of the persistent vegetative state hovers around forty percent. The presence or absence of consciousness in another person simply isn't measurable. It is something that we can only infer, and as such it's subject to observer bias. The diagnosis itself is a Rorschach test, as dependent on the observer's beliefs in the meaning of life and death as end-of-life decisions are on a patient's beliefs. ... We've been down this road before, most famously with Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan. In both of those cases, families fought hard for the right to discontinue treatment; treatment that they felt was futile. Today, the Schiavos are fighting equally hard to continue treatment; treatment that so many others feel is futile. So little and so much has changed in the past ten years. Our science is no closer to understanding consciousness, but our society is more confident that those living in altered forms of it are closer to death than to life. In the era of Quinlan and Cruzan, the burden of proof lay on those who would deny basic care to the severely cognitively impaired. Today, the burden of proof is on those who would continue it. If that isn't a slide down the slippery slope, what is?