Reply #190: White House contender in ‘quackery’ row over dying woman

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March 20, 2005

Sunday Times
Tony Allen-Mills in Washington



ONE of the Republican party’s leading contenders for the White House in 2008 was accused of “grotesque quackery” yesterday after intervening in an increasingly acrimonious medical debate over the condition of Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida woman at the centre of a life-or-death legal battle.

Senator Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican who was a leading heart surgeon before he turned to politics, added a new twist to the bitterly fought case when he offered a controversial medical opinion based on his reviews of family videotapes of Schiavo lying comatose in bed.

Frist took to the Senate floor to dispute findings by Florida doctors that their 41-year-old patient was in a “persistent vegetative state”.

After seven years of legal wrangling over whether Schiavo should be kept alive artificially, the Florida judge in charge of the case ruled last week that her feeding tubes could be removed.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1533567,00.html