Opinion: New guidelines on severe brain injury complicate already difficult decisions
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 arousable, and they typically need a ventilator to breathe for them.
