A London NHS Trust v DT (by her litigation friend the Official Solicitor) and YT [2025] EWCOP 36. 21 October 2025, Judgment here
Just occasionally a judgment from another jurisdiction can make you scratch your head very hard if you try and look at it through coronial eyes. This recent decision from the Court of Protection around brain stem testing and the neurological diagnosis of death has managed to leave your blogger with full blown dermatillomania.
But let’s first start with Schrödinger’s cat – a 90 year old thought experiment exploring superpositions in quantum mechanics (an entirely probabilistic system, which bears little relationship to the generally understood deterministic laws of physics that human life generally operates under). Radioactive atoms are considered by some quantum physicists to be in two states at once: decayed and not decayed and only switching to one of those to states when observed. To test this quantum theory Schrödinger sealed his theoretical cat in a box along with some theoretical unstable atoms and a batch of poison, thereby linking poor kitty’s fate to a random subatomic event. In the paradox the cat is to be simultaneously considered both alive and dead at the same time until the box is opened and its state is observed.
BUT NO, I hear you scream, life is deterministic not probabilistic, and therefore the cat is either alive or dead even before one looks in the box. On looking you are simply observing what already has occurred. It’s not that the cat is both dead and alive, it’s just that we don’t KNOW if it’s dead or alive. Of course that was exactly Schrödinger’s point, as he sought to diss his fellow physicists with his fluffy feline paradox.
On one view of this present case, the law seems to have led the judge to approach the decision making regarding the unfortunate woman patient as if she too were a sub-atomic particle within a probabilistic system, who could be both alive and dead at the same time.