Schiavo videotape misleading, experts say

The videotape that runs endlessly on television stations around the world shows an apparently smiling Terri Schiavo being caressed by her mother's loving hand.

She seems to look deeply, even lovingly, into the off-camera eyes of her mother.

Schiavo's parents and their supporters, including doctors in Congress, have used the tape as evidence the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman is at least occasionally aware of her surroundings and might even be revived from her condition.

They are fighting to get her feeding tube reinserted against the wishes of her husband and legal guardian who says Schiavo would not want to be kept alive in that condition.

But many experts agree the tape is a cruelly misleading trick of biology.

"Pictures do lie," said Dr. Lawrence Schneiderman, a physician and bioethicist at the University of California, San Diego.

"Every time they have done a videotaped neurological examination, the courts have reviewed them and said, 'Yes this woman is unconscious.' Those movements of her eyeballs are reflexive and have nothing to do with recognition."

Studies of people whose cerebral cortices are damaged in the way Schiavo's is show that their eyes will respond to stimuli such as movement or a human face, but there is no way for them to be conscious of what they are seeing.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has been part of the fight to prolong Schiavo's life, said on Wednesday a review of Schiavo's medical records by a neurologist for Florida's Adult Protective Services indicated she may have been misdiagnosed and was more likely in a state of minimal consciousness rather than in a persistent vegetative state.

Such a condition, in which a patient slips in and out of consciousness, was sometimes mistaken for a persistent vegetative state, said Dr. Joseph Fins of New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. But Schiavo was not in that state, Fins said.

"I think now it can be argued that with the advent of minimally conscious state (as a diagnosis), that permanent vegetative state as a diagnosis becomes much more certain," Fins said in a telephone interview.

It is almost certain that when someone suffers brain damage from a lack of oxygen, they are permanently vegetative, Fins said. Schiavo's brain was starved of oxygen after her heart stopped 15 years ago and most doctors who have examined her say there is no chance of recovery.

'UNNERVING PHENOMENON'

Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurologist and bioethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said reflexes can fool nonspecialists.

"To the families and loved ones, and to inexperienced health care professionals, PVS (permanent vegetative state) patients often look fairly 'normal,'" Cranford said in a statement.