Too late for the Schiavo family now

news @ nature.com�-'Miracle recovery' shows brain's resilience - Man who 'awoke' after 19 years shows how nerve cells can regrow.

The article above seems highly relevant to the Schiavo case, but it is no use now:

The amazing recovery of a man who had spent almost two decades in a barely conscious state has revealed the brain's previously unrecognized powers of recovery.

Terry Wallis became a media star in 2003 when he emerged from the minimally conscious state (MCS) in which he had spent 19 years, since suffering severe brain damage in a motor accident. At the time, his 'miracle' recovery was a mystery. Researchers who have examined his brain now think that his emergence was due to painstaking regrowth of the affected areas that ultimately allowed him to regain some of his faculties....

Neurologists are reluctant to declare that PVS, the condition at the centre of the controversial debate over US sufferer Terri Schiavo, can ever be truly permanent. Earlier this year, researchers made the bizarre discovery that some PVS patients could be roused with a simple sleeping pill (see 'Sleeping pills offer wake-up call to vegetative patients').

But the tendency is to assume that the chances of recovery trail off with time, an assumption that will be overturned by the latest discovery, Laureys hopes. "That's the real message," he says.

Having said that, the article does not suggest that such remarkable recoveries are ever likely to be anything other than rare. However, if in the Schiavo case there were no issues with the cost of her treatment, and a family who wanted to be actively involved in caring for her, it does seem a pity that they were denied the chance to see if she could recover.