You’ve heard stories of people waking up from comas, but how often is it claimed that a person in a vegetative state for 23 years wakes up and can suddenly communicate with his family in sophisticated ways? That is the claim in this story, but not so fast! If you read the entire story, you’ll see that family members are taking the man’s fingers and pointing at a special keyboard. He’s not able to move his hand himself. He’s not able to speak. Does this sound suspicious? Check out this quote:
The therapist, Linda Wouters, told APTN that she can feel Houben guiding her hand with gentle pressure from his fingers, and that she feels him objecting when she moves his hand toward an incorrect letter.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said he is skeptical of Houben’s ability to communicate after seeing video of his hand being moved along the keyboard.
“That’s called ‘facilitated communication,'” Caplan said. “That is ouija board stuff. It’s been discredited time and time again. When people look at it, it’s usually the person doing the pointing who’s doing the messages, not the person they claim they are helping.”
So there it is: Yet another case of hope prevailing over the evidence. This same issue of “facilitated communication” once swept the United States among people with severely autistic children. Many parents who desperately wanted to believe that their severely autistic children were suddenly writing sophisticated phrases have been devastated to learn that it was actually a case of “automatic writing,” displaying the thoughts and the attitudes of the facilitators rather than the patients.
There is a well known case here in The Netherlands of a guy who had been considered to be completely vegetative all his life, until a nurse discovered that he was able to move his left knee sideways a minute amount. They installed a microswitch in his wheel chair and took communication from there, morse style.
I remember him being interviewed on Dutch television. As he had a lot of time on his hands all day, he had taken to learn himself chess. He was very happy to finally be able to play against others via his new comms system.
The point in this case was that this guy was able to provide original personal information and thus proved that he was fully conscious.
This new case should be vetted also along this line: What information can the patient provide which cannot possibly be known by the helper.
Planeten: Good words of caution. The whole thing looks suspicious to me, but there is a possibility that he really did pop into full consciousness. Any facilitated communication would have to be carefully scrutinized, but there is a possibility that the man described in my post really is conscious.
Here's a feel-good story about a potential new treatment for MS that, if true, is dramatic and relatively simple. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/rese…
Italian MS research: Nobel Prize material IMHO. The doctor already has collected the prize he wanted though :-).
It is a heart-warming story. And what if he is truly on to something huge? There are about 400,000 people with MS in the U.S. alone. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/40510.ph…
But yes, he already got the biggest prize he could have hoped for.
It does remind me of that old adage: Necessity is the mother of invention.