[MSNBC] Suspended animation may not be just for sci-fi movies anymore: Trauma surgeons soon will try plunging some critically injured people into a deep chill — cooling their body temperatures as low as 50 degrees — in hopes of saving their lives.
Many trauma patients have injuries that should be fixable but they [...]

[ChicagoTribune] If ever Carol Gaetjens becomes unconscious with no hope of awakening, even if she could live for years in that state, she says she wants her loved ones to discontinue all forms of artificial life support.  But now there’s a catch for this churchgoing Catholic woman. U.S. bishops have decided that it is not [...]

[dailymail] A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them [...]

Step aside Jack Kevorkian, there’s a new “Dr. Death” in town.
Ten years after the notorious Michigan doctor was ultimately jailed for killing a patient — one of 130 he helped die through lethal injection — Philip Nitschke, a new renegade physician, is spreading the gospel of assisted suicide — and he’s coming to the United [...]

Official guidelines are causing a crisis in care of the terminally ill and growing anger among patients’ families, medical experts say.
[BBC] The advice allows food and fluids to be withdrawn from patients, who are then continuously sedated, if they are judged to be close to death.
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph the six doctors [...]