Case of Rom Houben Should Prompt Renewed Look at Terri Schiavo's Death

Subject:	Case of Rom Houben Should Prompt Renewed Look at Terri Schiavo's Death
Date:	Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:54:23 -0500

http://www.lifenews.com/bio3024.html

Case of Rom Houben Should Prompt Renewed Look at Terri Schiavo's Death

by Wesley J. Smith
December 24, 2009

LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery
Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture.
His most recent book is the Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World. This
opinion column originally appeared in the Church Report.

Terri Schiavo continues to prick our collective conscience, our sensitivity
to the way she died -- deprived of all food and water, even the balm of ice
chips for nearly two weeks -- as raw today as on the day she drew her last
breath five years ago next March.

Usually, the trauma remains just beneath the surface. But every once in a
while events conspire to bring it all back to the fore. Take, for example,
the intense international focus paid to Rom Houben. In 1983, Houben suffered
catastrophic head injuries in an automobile accident. He was brought to the
hospital unconscious. Doctors eventually concluded that his case was
hopeless, that he was in a persistent vegetative state.

The PVS diagnosis meant that on the day Terri died, most bioethicists would
have also approved Rom being dehydrated to death. He is no longer a
"person," they might have said., Why prolong a useless life?

Indeed, removing food and water from the profoundly cognitively impaired,
has, over the last twenty years, been legalized in all fifty states and
declared by bioethicists and judges to be fully ethical, indeed, just a
matter of "death with dignity." This, even though repeated studies have
shown that about 40% of PVS diagnoses are mistaken.

One of those misdiagnoses, it turned out, was of Rom Houben.

Unlike Terri, he is alive today and-literally-telling his tale because he
didn't have a spouse dedicated to making sure he died, nor a judge refusing
his family's every entreaty to try new brain tests. Indeed, his family
eventually prevailed upon internationally renowned physician Dr. Steven
Laureys to perform a PET scan of Rom's brain-not available at the time of
the initial diagnosis-which revealed startlingly that his brain activity was
near normal.

Further studies revealed that Rom Houbens was actually fully awake and aware
but unable to communicate, a condition known as the "locked-in state,"

Therapy commenced and soon Rom was communicating in a rudimentary way by
answering yes or no questions with the movement of a foot. Patiently over
three years, his abilities improved. Rom now communicates with the help of a
speech therapist-who moves his finger over a computer keyboard, allowing him
to contract his finger to type each letter.

He is now telling his story of years of terrible frustration and loneliness
during the 23 years he was isolated by his inability to communicate-and then
great joy of reconnecting with the world, an event he calls his "second
birth."

The news about Rom's marked improvement has been surprisingly controversial.
Some critics have groused that his interactivity is actually a "facilitated
communication" scam, in which the actual communicator is the therapist
rather than the patient. But that seems unlikely.

Dr. Laureys is internationally renowned, and in an interview in the New
Scientist, he denied participating in such a subterfuge. A story in the
Associated Press provided details casting doubt on the facilitated
communication criticism:

One of the checks Laureys applied to verify Houben was really communicating
was to send the speech therapist away before showing his patient different
objects. When the aide came back and Houben was asked to say what he saw,
that same hand held by the aide punched in the right information, he said.

Meanwhile, as people marveled at Rom's turn in fortune, Terri Schiavo
quickly became the subtext of the story. While no one contended she was also
locked-in (her autopsy stated that the condition of her brain was consistent
with either PVS or minimal consciousness), activists on both sides of the
ethical debate over dehydrating patients weighed in about how to best care
(or not care) for such patients.

Noted bioethicist, Art Caplan, who strongly backed Michael Schaivo's quest
to end his wife's life, assured people that it is proper to remove
sustenance from the profoundly impaired whether or not they are actually
unconscious.

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post's resident bioethicist, Jacob Appel, argued
that patients such as Rom should be considered for euthanasia: "Rather than
offering a compelling reason to keep such patients alive," Appel wrote, "the
horrors of enduring such a petrified existence may offer a compelling reason
to let them die."

In contrast, the Calgary Herald spoke just as strongly when it
editorialized, "The lesson from Houben's case--and reinforced, sadly, too
late by Schiavo's case-- is that if doctors and courts must err, it should
always be on the side of life, and on the assumption that despite all
outward appearances, the "I" is "indeed there."

Others in the media also made the Schiavo connection. Time, for example,
reported that Schiavo-type "legal fights are likely to become more common as
classifications of brain-injury severity are revised." ABC reported that
Terri Schiavo's family "felt heartbreak and vindication" about the story.

So Terri Schiavo remains very much with us. Polls show that most people
believe that her dehydration was just and proper because she was so
impaired. But perhaps our inner voice, the part of us that never lies, sees
it differently. Perhaps the reason Terri Schiavo comes so quickly to mind
whenever we hear stories about "miraculous" awakenings, is that we remain
profoundly disturbed by what we did to her, haunted it would seem, by her
beautifully smiling face.

--
J Young
Jvisions@live.com