[Undertoad]

Got it liz, thanks. from Nancy Grace:

GRACE: Dr. Eric Braverman, are we convinced that Terri Schiavo feels nothing? I find it hard to believe that -- taking someone off a ventilator, that`s one thing, but allowing them to starve to death?

DR. ERIC BRAVERMAN, DIRECTOR OF PATH MEDICAL: I appreciate your empathy, but Terri has been dead for a very long time, essentially. And she has gone to God. And what you have there is a brain essentially filled with water and a flat line EEG of a persistent vegetative state.

And you need to understand that the empathy is being misplaced. We have a brain health crisis in this country, and this person has been essentially brain dead. Nobody has any hope of function -- even if it was MCS, a minimally conscious state, she would never recover. What you`re looking there is a corpse and an embalmed individual that is being preserved unnaturally, a waste of medical resources, a misunderstanding of false hope that`s been projected. It is a tragedy.

GRACE: Dr. Braverman, have you ever actually seen Terri Schiavo?

BRAVERMAN: I have spoken with Dr. Cranford. Actually, doctors don`t need to see the patient. The video analysis is a deception. What doctors need is to know a flat line EEG. I`ve kept hamster brains alive and guinea pig brains alive for ten hours in a dish and they had more EEG activity. You have to understand...

GRACE: Sanjay...

BRAVERMAN: You have to understand. She has less brain activity than animals. She has a brain filled with water or cerebral spinal fluid.

GRACE: Let me go very quickly to Dr. Gupta. Response, Sanjay?

GUPTA: First of all, you know, she doesn`t have a flat EEG. And I think that everyone who initially said that has disagreed that she has a flat EEG. Calling her brain dead just is not right.

And whether or not she`s in a persistent vegetative state, or a permanent vegetative state, or a minimally conscience, you can argue those terms, but I think it`s irresponsible probably to keep saying that she is brain dead. Because clearly you can look at that person and see that she`s not brain dead. It doesn`t add anything to the argument here, Nancy.

Braverman is using the "shorthand" of saying the EEG is flat because there was one dead section of her brain. The leads measuring activity in those sections would be flat although leads in other areas measuring involuntary activity would not be flat. Gupta objects because there are other sections of her brain that are not dead. Describing her as "brain dead" is wrong because she still had functioning brain matter that was not flat on an EEG. That functioning brain matter governed involuntary activity such as breathing and blinking.