<p>Be really careful with self-published journals. Anyone can make up an impressive name for a forum or website or journal. </p>
<p>In the Schiavo case, after numerous neurologists, including some of the best in the country, personally examined her and concluded she was PVS, the family went doctor-shopping and found a Dr Hammesfahr who self-published, claimed he was a Nobel prize nominee, and suggested alternative treatment that was clearly completely out of the norm for neurological care. It so happened he went to Northwestern’s med school, which caught my eye. Northwestern med school issued a statement at the time basically confirming that he had been trained there but that his views did not represent the scientific consensus of the neurology community, and the neurology faculty at Northwestern Memorial Hospital issued a similar statement - basically saying the guy was a quack. It’ll be interesting to see if something similar happens with this guy that they doctor-shopped for.</p>
<p>The doctor who tells the parents that Jahi is alive has his own definition of death.</p>
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<p>And this:</p>
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<p>I’m here to tell you that a patient can be dead, completely and totally dead, not on any mechanical support, and will not necessarily be cold, stiff, or blue. </p>
<p>Reading more and more about this doctor is giving me a sick feeling inside.</p>
<p>Sally,
There are almost 500 posts here, and if there were posters who portrayed the family as money grubbing opportunists, I musta missed that. All I did was google his name when it was posted, and shared what came up. It was merely fact. With nothing further. And frankly I find the implication you made about the meaning behind sharing this link offensive. Comes across as projection to me, JMO. Glad to hear that wasn’t your intent, or at least that you weren’t accusing me of such, as that would be a fallacy.</p>
<p>Nrdsb4,
I think that charlatan should have his license yanked. That is pure tom-foolery. If the attorney found this clown and thinks they are helping the family by promoting this as “medical opinion”, thats horribly unkind to them. It sounds like a religious belief, and may fit with their religious belief, but to present it under the guise of his MD as a medical opinion is outrageous.</p>
<p>So according to this quack we should keep every dead body on a ventilator? A lot of people could be kept for weeks on a ventilator after they died. This plan sounds quite awful to me. It’s not just that no organ donation would happen, but ICUs would be filled with dead people.</p>
<p>jym, the offensive posts about the family are there among the 500. I am not going to dignify them by pasting them here.</p>
<p>It’s a new year. Let’s hope the family is starting to accept the inevitable. I think the reason this case arouses so many passions is that it is painful no matter how one looks at it.</p>
<p>Death is a fact of life (no pun intended). Very sad for the family but it happens every day. To have an attorney helping them to delay the inevitable is sad and I do wonder where he is coming from with these delay tactics.</p>
<p>I have never lost a child so can’t imagine that. One miscarriage and that was bad enough. All of my kids grandparents are now gone- 3 of the 4 required hard decisions to be made about treatment or not, hospice,etc. It is never easy. I hope this ends soon. It does not seem healthy for anyone involved to keep this going.</p>
<p>I’m not necessarily saying the foundation is respectable. I’m actually sort of leaning toward it not being so. But the doctor has real credentials. He’s a real M.D., not the product of some quackery school that hands out M.D.s to anyone willing to fork over the money. Pizzagirl’s post on the Schiavo case proves that sometimes medical schools and professional organizations can distance themselves from an alumni when they eschew the science they had been trained for. I’m sure there are more cases out there like this. I guess when I was searching out his credentials, I wondered if he might be a Dr. Laura-type person… someone who calls themselves a doctor, and may have a Ph.D., but not in the specialty needed to evaluate this case. I agree that most physicians do not refer to themselves as Dr. XXXX XXXXX, M.D.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there are reflexes which can occur which have no relation to brain function and which can confuse families (but should not confuse a physician such as Dr. Byrne).</p>
<p>When I was a nursing student, I worked the night shift at a large county hospital which is known for its critical care units. One night I came onto my shift to see two young doctors standing over the bed of a patient. They told me he had just died. I could see the evidence of the patient having been disconnected to the ventilator but with the ET tube still in place, likely because he was going to be examined by the ME. One doctor said,
"You need to listen to his heart, because just after death, you can hear some really strange sounds. " I bent over the patient, put my stethescope over the patient’s heart and tried to listen. At that moment, the patient lurched up, his arms outstretched, and made a big airy groan. It truly scared the crap out of me. I looked around to see that many of the interns and residents had been observing me from behind pillars in the large room, all of them laughing at my reaction. Now I know this to be a Lazarus reflex, not any signs of a living human being.</p>
<p>The above sounds cruel, unethical, and completely inappropriate. All I can do is agree, but state that in these units where traumatic death and futility is an every day occurrence, some people develop some rather inappropriate coping mechanisms to help distance themselves from the horror. The point is that a dead man literally moved and made a vocalization in spite of the fact that he was most certainly irretrievably dead.</p>
<p>Sally, if there were a few off the cuff comments, they must be well buried in this thread. Any thread is going to get a smattering of opinion (and I agree with actingmt that its possible you may be misinterpreting). And opinion may change as more information comes out. Regardless, the general tone of the thread, at least as long as I’ve been participating, seems to be that the family is in a horribly tragic situation, and caught in a system that may be over their heads. I was surprised to see that an aunt, who is a nurse and was suctioning Jahi herself (read somewhere this may have been occurring during shift change which may have affected the staff response) is not challenging this whacked view of death and the stuff their hired gun is saying. Again, maybe it matches their belief system, but I am of the opinion, at least with the info currently available, that their “expert” should be tar and feathered, and the strategy of their attorney seems to be causing them more psychological harm than anything else. And if presenting what is out in the public as"fact" is a bad thing, I guess I shouldn’t mention (again, not that it is “directly” related, so please, no lectures) that on facebook, her father (assuming thats him) calls himself “Milton Millionero McMath”. Maybe the attorney should give him the same lecture about what he puts on facebook that we tell our kids!!</p>
<p>“So according to this quack we should keep every dead body on a ventilator? A lot of people could be kept for weeks on a ventilator after they died. This plan sounds quite awful to me.”</p>
<p>Why not connect every person who died of a cardiac arrest to an artificial heart machine bypassing the malfunctioned organ? Why stop at brain death?
Agree with jym - his license has to be taken away.</p>
<p>Agree with everything, except–I am really opposed to looking at and mocking people’s FB pages or names. What the heck??? (feels just a smidge classist. “we” would know better, right?.)</p>
<p>Again, thats projection. There is no “mocking” . Its a factual report of how he lists himself. Nor do I see “classism”. Its a simple observation of what is there. Guess classism is in the eye of the beholder. That said, it may not be all that different than an attorney advising a client how to dress when he/she comes before the court.</p>
<p>And Flossy, your point is well taken. You got ripped a new one for your terminology, or how it was perceived, a day or so ago. Don’t know if it would have evoked the same response today. Guess it is in part about “appearances”, or how things seem to come across to others.</p>
<p>And flossy, you appear now to be off the hook as I am currently the one being skewered. But the perceptions are fascinating. Somehow it was OK when I typed the name of the whacked doctors, whose names were provided by cc posters on this thread, into my search engine, read their bios and/or affiliations as they are what popped up (along with some of the articles I also linked) , and shared them in this thread, but somehow it was NOT ok to do the very same thing with the name of the dad when that was posted by someone in this thread. All I did was type the name into the search engine and share what came up. Same exact procedure. But it was interpreted very differently. Fascinating, actually, the responses and accusations that ensued.</p>
<p>The only difference was that I happened to have my fbk page open, reading happy new year posts, when I was also seeing the most recent follow-up posts on my phone, so I typed in the dads name into facebook and shared what came up. Was the name just a little funny? Maybe so. Then again there are lots of funny names on facebook. I tried to make a lighthearted comment about what we tell our kids about facebook, and got skewered for that too :(</p>
<p>By the way, the mom has raised over 42K in her fund, should anyone care. Will I be skewered for stumbling across that too?</p>
<p>Bad facts are still facts. The motives ascribed to posters bothered by bad facts are projection. Great word! Obesity, marches, publicity, Facebook posts, or whatever are part of this case. That doesn’t change the fact that a family sadly lost a child and I didn’t see anyone call them or even their attorney money-grubbing. No-one. That’s projection.</p>