Most End-of-Life Cases Avoid Courtrooms

March 21, 2005 — -- Terri Schiavo is not the first young woman to be the fulcrum of a nationwide debate over medical ethics and a patient's right to die.

Karen Ann Quinlan, 21, entered a persistent vegetative state after mixing alcohol and drugs at a party in 1975. Her family fought hospital administrators to have her removed from a respirator, winning their case in the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1976.

In 1983, Nancy Cruzan, 25, entered PVS following an auto accident. Though her family decided to remove her feeding tube, state hospital officials in Missouri refused. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court before her feeding tube was eventually disconnected in 1990.

But medical dramas involving terminal cases that play out in headline news reports are exceptional. According to most experts, the vast majority of these cases are handled quietly among the doctors and families involved.

"There are an estimated 4,000 deaths each day where there's a conscious decision to limit treatment in some way," said Dr. Ron Cranford, professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

"We have an estimated 14,000 to 35,000 adults and kids in a persistent vegetative state every year," he said. "It's a routine thing to discontinue treatment. These decisions are made behind the scenes."

Other estimates place the number of adult patients in PVS in the United States between 15,000 and 25,000. The annual cost of caring for these patients is estimated to be as high as $7 billion.

Cranford is among the neurologists who personally examined Terri Schiavo -- in 2002 he confirmed the Florida woman was in PVS. "There's no doubt -- not a shred of doubt," he said. Schiavo's feeding tube was removed Friday after a years-long legal battle between her husband and her parents.

Dr. Stephen S. Lefrak, professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine and chair of the ethics committee at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, confirmed that ending the care of a patient -- also known as "terminal wean" -- is a decision made daily in most hospitals.