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Slate senior editor Andy Bowers explains "persistent vegetative state" — the term doctors have used to describe Terri Schiavo's condition. The Florida woman suffered severe brain damage a decade ago, ...

The American Academy of Neurology (AAN) has received many inquiries from the press regarding the definition of persistent vegetative state in light of the Terri Schiavo case. In 1995 the AAN published ...

Sophisticated brain-imaging techniques suggest that a young woman in a vegetative state five months after a traffic accident had some mental functioning, even though she was unable to physically ...

Much of the ammunition in the battle over Terri Schiavo’s fate has been medical language that’s fairly new in the public realm. The terms can mean one thing to experts and another thing entirely when ...

PHILADELPHIA — For two decades, car-crash victim Rom Houben lay paralyzed and voiceless in what his doctors thought was a vegetative state. He appeared to be awake, but showed no signs of awareness.

While serving a search warrant on a December afternoon in 1979, Minneapolis police Officer David Mack was shot in the neck and abdomen, triggering a cascade of events that left him in a persistent ...

This word let a severely brain injured patient tell neuroscientists she was still conscious using only her thoughts. This word could do more harm than good for these patients if we aren’t careful. In ...

During this week's Fall General Assembly, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops approved revision guidelines for medically assisted nutrition and hydration, particularly for patients in a ...

Scans have shown near-normal brain activity in a second patient who is in a vegetative state, British researchers reported on Monday in a study that may show a way to predict who is likely to recover ...

CAMBRIDGE, England — When a Belgian-British research team began to suspect that many brain-damaged patients are misdiagnosed by medical practitioners, they used brain scans to establish two-way ...