Physician-Assisted Suicide: A Case Study

The thing that kept Steven going was the thought that Jeffrey having cancer was going to be a mistake. During Jeffrey’s stay at the Philadelphia Children's hospital Steven was kept unnotified of how Jeffrey was doing. Apart of that he was getting no attention whatsoever from either of his parents. Steven felt forgotten and this brought anger. Through journals from Miss Palma’s class he wrote about how nobody had thought about how he was feeling about this situation. However when Jeffrey and his mother returned from Philadelphia Steven learned that the thoughts he had was wrong.

“Someone call 911”, I said, when I saw a girl fall down the stairs lying unconscious. The nurse at Rockdale County High School assisted with the situation. My friend Fred and I held her so she wouldn’t hurt herself any more than had already been done. The nurse notified us that this girl has epilepsy (meaning that a person has had two or more seizures, but it’s not contagious & is not caused by mental illness or mental retardation). I didn’t pay too much attention to what the nurse was saying because I was focused on the girl's breathing and her ability regain consciousness. The nurse insisted on calling her sister to be there for her when she wakes up. The nurse knew that when she would wake up, she would want to hug one of us or her sister because all she remembers is blacking out during the time it took place.

A. There is no fundamental liberty that promotes the idea of a legal right to die.

After suffering from a stroke, many victims go through rehabilitation to help regain the language skills they lost from their stroke. Specific abilities that are lost or impaired are speech and language skills, which result in acquiring aphasia. In 2001, constraint induced aphasia therapy (CIAT) was introduced by Friedemann Pulvermuller. It is a therapeutic technique that allows one to achieve their individual vocational communication needs. CIAT is known to be one of the most successful forms of therapy for aphasiac patients with promising and positive outcomes. Because of CIAT’s stringent treatment structure, one’s brain is trained to use its cognitive and vocational abilities that may have been damaged during the stroke. CIAT requires patients to use spoken language instead of other forms of nonverbal communication that they naturally want to use. Unlike many other forms of therapy, CIAT helps one to expand their expressive output abilities and their personal language production skills. Although stroke rehabilitation does not entirely restore brain damage, constraint induced aphasia therapy can significantly help one achieve their vocational communication needs again.

The study will allow both male and female participants presenting with aphasia over the age of 18. Participants must have experienced a first-ever cerebrovascular accident (CVA) to the left hemisphere and have no history of previous neurological damage, confirmed by magnetic resonance imagining (MRI). Individuals must be at least one-month post-onset of CVA, but the individual should still be in the sub-acute phase of recovery, thus, no more than a year post-onset. The participants will be evaluated using the Western Aphasia Battery Aphasia Quotient (AQ) (Kertesz, 1982) to determine the classification of aphasia, in which only the individuals with nonfluent aphasia will be permitted to participate in the study. Individuals with fluent aphasia often use spoken modalities filled with empty speech and jargon, therefore, in an attempt to limit confounding variables, they will not be included in the study. Additionally, individuals with nonfluent aphasia tend to have

This study had a sample size of four participants who experienced a left middle cerebral artery cerebrovascular accident and have one of three types of aphasia: anomic aphasia, Broca’s aphasia, or transcortical motor aphasia (Kalinyak-Fliszar et al., 2015). Each participant had two sessions with a VC and two sessions with a HC a day and the study lasted eight days. The participants role-played with the clinician and practiced real-life situations using four scripts. The sessions were classified as prepractice sessions, practice sessions, or postpractice sessions. Using AphasiaScripts, the VC has natural sounding speech and responds to the patient to carry on a natural conversation (Kalinyak-Fliszar et al., 2015). A designated person was behind the VC controlling the speech output of the device. The conversations between the clinician and the participant were recorded for later examination. Words and information units (IU) were counted from the recorded responses of the participants. The quantity of information was typically higher in the interaction with the VC, but the quality of information exchanged varied between the interaction with the VC and HC. Over the course of the sessions, two participants showed improvement

Aphasia is a communication disorder that affects not only the communication of the individual but also the communication of the people who interact with the individual on a regular basis. Language intervention, therefore, should include a component of training and educating the caregivers as well as the person with aphasia (Purdy & Hindenlang, 2005). In recent years, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have begun to take more of a social context approach to aphasia intervention, making it more functional for the client and including the caregivers through training (Turner & Whitworth, 2006). Many studies have investigated different types of caregiver training programs and their effectiveness on improved communication between the person

The current study proposes to use a modified version of the RTT (Lara, 2012). Modifications will be done so that the RTT can be used in an ERP experiment. A modified computerized version of the RTT allows for more control over the administration and scoring of responses to give a much more accurate look at the comprehension abilities of persons with aphasia. Two versions of the test (spoken and written messages) will be used to compare the performance between the two groups of individuals responding to spoken and written sentence length messages. This study will compare two groups of individuals. Individuals with aphasia will be assigned to the experimental group. Individuals with no brain damage will

When clinicians are planning their therapy sessions for their clients with aphasia there is a model for aphasia therapy that is used. Through the use of the model it informs clinicians on how to use efficient intervention with aphasia clients. This knowledge will help with making the clients intervention more effective. The clinician should always think about the client as a whole not just about their impairment. When planning therapy and procedures for a client with aphasia the clinician should have an understanding of the clients’ background, family, interest and environment. This will help with making the therapy planning and procedures more individualized to that client. Furthermore, the clinicians comprehension of the model will make the

To summarize the demands of speech-language pathologists treating individuals with right hemisphere brain damage, Margaret Blake,Tobi Frymark, and Rebecca Venedictovb conducted a review of the current literature available concerning communication treatments for these clients. A review of their study highlights specific areas needed for further research as well as important considerations that must be made when administering treatment. The study discusses important factors such as cognitive ability and word association deficits which often impact treatment. Critiquing the article provides an insight as to where more research is needed and illustrates the depth of knowledge concerning current treatments.

This aphasia mash-up project is intended to remediate lexical retrieval at the discourse level in a variety of communication settings and communication partners relevant to the patient’s interests. People with Aphasia often have difficulty with word retrieval which limits discourse capacity. This in turn negatively effects communication interactions with others and increases isolation. Therefore, therapy is often centered around improving word retrieval that will facilitate communication with others. Unfortunately, trained skills in therapy have demonstrated varying levels of generalization. There are several treatment approaches that have demonstrated efficacy for individuals with aphasia such as Semantic Feature Analysis. A limitation with this method is that it focuses on nouns and has not shown limited generalization to generalize to discourse and hashave not shown significant evidence for maintenance (Kiran & Bassetto 2008). Another approach used in therapy is the use of verbs. Verbs are central to syntax, semantics and event memory. Therefore, VNeST is effective because it targets semantic networks based around verbs, which also targets things such as nouns, syntax, and thematic roles. Verbs are expected to activate more neural networks in comparison to targeting nouns alone. Furthermore, previous studies have used VNeST and shown to be beneficial to patients with moderate fluent and non-fluent aphasia (Edmonds et al. 2009). The first article used investigated the

These articles are relevant to the topic of aphasia, since they point out where more research is needed to answer important questions that could possibly improve the recuperation in early aphasia. For example, there still needs to be an accurate understanding of what the right amount of therapy is, what the right type of therapy is, and what is the most effective time in recovery is (Godecke et al., 2013). But overall the researchers make important contributions as to what factors potentially play a vital role in the early recovery of

According to sources, Aphasia is described as a communication disorder that usually affects the use of acquired spoken or written language (Halpern & Goldfarb, 2013). Patients that have been diagnosed with aphasia in general usually have difficulties with auditory understanding, reading comprehension, written language difficulties and of course difficulty in spoken language expression (Halpern & Goldfarb, 2013). One of the most essential areas that patients with aphasia want to see improvements in is the ability to have functional spoken communication (Mayer, 2003). It is vital that clinicians focus on the needs of the patient by introducing the patient to different therapy techniques that will benefit them outside of the treatment environment

The limitations of rehabilitation efforts have set off an interest in finding other solutions to improve the neurological recovery, and scientists have reviewed several therapies, such as antidepressants, which is found to enhance a person's motor ability to be restored and Alzheimer's disease drugs to boost recovery from aphasia, which also includes problems in speaking, writing and understanding a spoken or written

Aphasia is a common language disorder. Approximately, 1 in 250 people in United State of America suffer from aphasia according to the estimation of National Institute of Neurological Disorder and Stroke. Fifteen percent of individuals who are under 65 years old are diagnosed with aphasia, the percentage will be raised to 43% in a group of people at the age of 85 or older. People who are diagnosed with aphasia commonly show significant impairment in language and communication skills, consisting of the abilities of writing, reading, verbal expression and auditory comprehension, or significant degeneration in language communication after brain injury (normally a stroke).