Terri Schiavo's Autopsy: Will The Facts Change Anyone's Mind?

NOTE: I was thisclose to posting on Terri Schiavo when John bigfooted me. (Damn him and his faster typing skills!) Here are my thoughts anyway.

Just watched the press conference about the autopsy of Terri Schiavo -- naturally after about 20 minutes, every news channel I checked had grown bored and moved onto their experts or other news while the medical examiners were still answering questions. heck, they've only got 24 hours a day to fill, why stay with the entire press conference?

But the facts are simple and straightforward: there is no evidence Terri Schiavo was abused or mistreated (they pointed especially to the barrage of exams performed right after her initial collapse that would have indicated this). Terri Schiavo was clinically blind, putting to rest the sad delusion that she was looking at people or following a balloon or other actions utterly impossible given her condition. Terri Schiavo's brain was HALF the size of a normal person of her age; in other words she was severely dysfunctional and incapable of the reactions her family and outsiders who hadn't even examined her wanted to imagine she was performing. Terri Schiavo would have choked to death if given food or water via her mouth -- so those fools rushing the security guards to give Terri water would have killed her, not helped her. And no amount of therapy or treatment would have ever changed her condition.

In numerous other details, the medical examiner reinforced the facts that were known for more than a decade and confirmed by every responsible medical professional involved in her care -- both those directly hired by the family factions and those appointed by the courts. Every absurd charge has been undercut or proven flatly wrong. Every sound medical finding has been reinforced when possible.

Do basic scientific facts matter anymore? Are people obsessed with emotional hysteria and a refusal to listen to the facts going to be any more likely to face the truth now than they were during the media circus that surrounded her final days? Will the news channels that insultingly showed that edited footage of Terri with New Age-y guitar playing in the background now show it and state the medical facts -- that Terri was blind, her brain shrunken down to nothing and she was incapable of recovering anything like an emotional response to the world around her? I doubt it.

This is a larger pattern: the far right refusing to face facts on global warming or evolution or the fact that condoms work and are an essential part of any program to combat AIDS and on and on. In short, the far right hates science, hates facts, hates the truth.

One surprise: the medical examiners undercut the diagnosis of bulimia for Terri, which had been accepted in court and served as the basis for a medical malpractice suit the husband won against her initial care providers. The medical examiners noted that the low potassium levels could have been caused by the treatment she received after her collapse. So her initial collapse more than a decade ago might not have been due to bulimia and as you would expect an autopsy so many years later couldn't possibly determine what HAD caused it.

My prediction: conspiracy theorists will jump on this finding to spin all sorts of nutty plots in which the husband diabolically caused Terri's initial collapse. Mind you, they won't have a single fact to support this and his actions for years afterward make the charge absurd, but not having any facts never stopped anyone, did it?