Ryan Joy (atxryan)

The findings open the possibility that some of these patients may be able to participate in decisions about their medical care, though a number of scientific, ethical, and legal issues will need to be discussed before taking this step. In the recent experiment, for example, scientists did not ask the patient whether he was in pain, instead sticking to factual questions with answers they could later confirm. "Before we tackle important issues such as pain, treatment, end of life, and so on, there are a lot of things we need to discuss among the medical community as whole," says Laureys.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24475/