Opinion: New guidelines on severe brain injury complicate already difficult decisions
Without better prognostic tools, doctors and families must make life and death decisions for individuals with catastrophic brain injuries in the face of conflicting recommendations from medical experts.
When someone sustains a serious brain injury and is unresponsive, how soon can doctors say whether he or she has a chance of meaningful recovery? That has always been a difficult question to answer, and it’s being made even tougher by new guidelines from the American Academy of Neurology.
As an intensive care unit pediatrician, I often work with families whose child has had a potentially catastrophic or devastating brain injury. Although the causes of these injuries vary — trauma, stroke, bleeding into the brain, and more — they create a common constellation of problems: the individuals are unconscious or only minimally
