GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: UAE woman wakes up after 27 years

domingo, 28 de abril de 2019

BioEdge: UAE woman wakes up after 27 years

BioEdge: UAE woman wakes up after 27 years

Bioedge

UAE woman wakes up after 27 years

by Michael Cook | 27 Apr 2019 |

^{Munira Abdulla at Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi / The National}

A woman from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is home with her family after 27 years in a minimally conscious state. Munira Abdulla was 32 when she was involved in a car accident in the UAE. She cradled her infant Omar just before impact – she had a severe head injury and he was only bruised. Over the years she moved from hospital to hospital in the UAE until 2017 when she was moved to the Schön Clinic in Bad Aibling, in southern Germany.

"Many doctors told us we shouldn't expect much after 15 or 20 years in a coma, but I never accepted that," Omar told Deutsche Welle. "Everything is in God's hands. I never lost hope."

Abdulla remains severely handicapped and is confined to a wheelchair. She is being treated with physiotherapy, drugs, operations and sensory stimulation.

Friedemann Müller, her neurologist, distinguished between a state of "minimal consciousness" and a coma. "No patient simply wakes up from a coma after 27 years,” he said. “The physical and mental state of the patient increased enormously over a period of a few weeks. She can now interact consciously with her environment and participate in family life again."

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge.

The latest figures for euthanasia deaths in Canada have just been published. Allowing for some deficiencies in the data, an astonishing 1.12% of deaths are attributable to what the Canadians call "Medical Aid in Dying" (MAiD). I say "astonishing" because, like many others, I thought that euthanasia would be "safe, legal and rare". Instead, between one in a hundred and one in fifty people die at the hands of a doctor.

The Ministry of Health explains that "The percentage of deaths ... continues to remain within the percentage of medically assisted deaths provided in other countries where 0.4% (Oregon, USA, 2017) to 4% (Netherlands, 2017) of total deaths has been attributed to a medically assisted death". Somehow this is meant to be reassuring, but comparing two figures which differ by a factor of ten and relate to two different practices (assisted suicide and euthanasia) is meaningless.

What should alarm all Canadians is that in a mere two years since legalisation, euthanasia has become so widespread. Is it going to stop at 4%? There's no reason to say that it will.