PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Petrů, Marek
TI  - The Doctor-Comatose Patient Relationship and Decision-Making in the Intensive Care Unit
DP  - 2020 Oct 13
TA  - e-rhizome
PG  - 19--31
VI  - 2
IP  - 1
AID - 10.5507/rh.2020.002
IS  - 2571242X
AB  - Cognitive science has not yet revealed the mystery of the mind, the principle and the origin of consciousness. We cannot determine with certainty whether a particular being has consciousness and is someone, or lacks it and is something. The doctor at the patient's bedside in the neurological intensive care unit has to, for example, make decisions even in this situation of uncertainty. In this study, using the example of clinical diagnostics and therapy of quantitative disorders of consciousness, the author examines the extent to which this ignorance represents a barrier preventing the neurologist from taking on the unambiguous decision about the therapy. He claims that the doctor in the intensive care unit is in a similar extreme situation, the solution of which requires analogous virtues that Tzvetan Todorov identified among prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.