Letter-writers to the NYReview of Books attempt to tell Joan Didion she was wrong about Terri Schiavo. No luck.

I am puzzled by Dr. Fins’s repeated assertion that I referred to him "out of context." I am also puzzled by his statement that he was talking about "the risk of misdiagnosis in patients who, unlike Ms. Schiavo, were not the object of heightened clinical scrutiny." Mrs. Schiavo was not the object of heightened clinical scrutiny. She was the object instead of heightened legal scrutiny. Until her death and subsequent autopsy she had not had a complete neurological examination in almost three years. She had never had a PET scan or an fMRI. The same New York Times piece quotes a professor of neurology at Dartmouth, Dr. James Bernat, who told the Times that "findings from studies like these would be relevant to cases like that of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman with brain damage who has been kept alive for years against her husband’s wishes. In that case…a brain-imaging test —once it has been standardized—could help determine whether brain damage has extinguished awareness."

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