The Boundaries of the Persistent Vegetative State

The persistent vegetative state (PVS) is a tragic neurological characterized by wakefulness without awareness. The typical patient suffered profound damage to hemispheric cortical neurons, which is to abolish awareness of self and environment but largely spares the ascending reticular activating neurons, thus not impairing. The most famous PVS patients were Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan, two young women whose illnesses were memorialized in highly landmark judicial decisions involving termination of medical. The American Academy of Neurology and the American Medical have stated that PVS is a clinical diagnosis that can be made at bedside by a skilled examiner when the essential clinical diagnostic are present. This claim implies that the boundaries of the diagnosis relatively distinct; thus, whether a given patient's condition falls or outside the diagnosis can be determined with a high level of. In this article, I will analyze that claim by presenting and a case in which expert neurologists disagreed whether a young woman in a PVS. I will identify several reasons why the certainty of the of PVS may be limited, and discuss the ethical and practical of that limitation.