According to the LA Times, Bill Frist's home video-based "diagnosis" of Terry Schiavo has drawn a rebuke from medical experts:
Frist's comments raised eyebrows in the medical community.
Although there are no official rules against the practice, ethicists said, it is generally considered unprofessional for a doctor to make or question a diagnosis on the basis of incomplete information.
"In general, physicians would consider it unprofessional for doctors to take clinical stands on issues without adequate clinical data," said Dr. Neil Wenger, head of the ethics committee at UCLA Medical Center.
William J. Winslade, a bioethicist and law professor at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was more direct. Frist "has no business making a diagnosis from a video," he said.
In his comments on the Senate floor, Frist said that based on the videotape of Schiavo and court records, she "does respond" to outside stimuli. "That footage, to me, depicted something very different than persistent vegetative state."
A Frist spokeswoman said Monday that the majority leader was not offering a diagnosis of Schiavo. "What he's saying is, it seems like there is a lot of gray area about whether she is in a persistent vegetative state," said Amy Call.
Michael Williams, chair of the ethics committee of the American Academy of Neurology, was among those taking exception to Frist's comments.
"For Dr. Frist to make a statement like that — it's like me making an off-the-cuff statement about a heart transplant patient," said Williams, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.
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