Cuppacafe

Update: Told 'ja so

A Belgian man who stunned the world last year by apparently communicating after 23 years in a coma cannot in fact do so, researchers say.

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Original post below

I think by now if you've watched any of the news, you've seen the story of the man locked inside of his body for 23 years [BBC] and where they've "discovered" that he's been awake this entire time, but unable to respond.

Most likely, this is bullshit.

And his responses so far have been fake.

The patient cannot move. At all. What's being moved is this man's finger by someone else to touch letters on a touchscreen keyboard. This poor man isn't talking, it's the person moving this guy's finger. Ever play with a Ouija board? Same thing.[Wikipedia] Watch any of the videos of this man "communicating" [MSNBC] and you can easily see how the man could be made to say anything. There's no independent test of his ability to retain information or have a coherent thought. The announcement that this patient is able to communicate is based on this "facilitator" typing with this guy's finger.

Locked in syndrome is real. I get that. Here's a story of one guy who remembered all sorts of things while he was in a coma. Thing is, until he came out of the coma, there was no way anyone could actually communicate with him. There were no "in-between" states where he could communicate but couldn't control any body parts. While I'm sympathetic to people with family members who are "locked in" I am not sympathetic to the plight of a man who is being used for a fraud.

Not only is it a fraud to claim a man can communicate without moving any body parts, it's a harmful fraud. People will actually get false hope out of this, thinking that there's a way to communicate with their hospitalized loved ones.

This is the exact same method used 100 years ago to communicate with the dead. It's just as fake today as it was then. It is the type of fakery that was exposed when people claimed to communicate with severely autistic children as seen in PBS' FRONTLINE special called "The Prisoners of Silence".

Here's the technical paper where the doctors assessed some 104 patients that were diagnosed with some form of coma. This is the actual study where this miracle patient was discovered. (or created, as I believe) The doctors then rated the patients on a variety of responses to stimuli. The goal is to properly assess whether the patient is conscious or not -- essentially helping in pain management -- after all, if the person can feel pain, it would help if you were properly dosing the pain meds. Makes sense. If you look at enough comatose patients, I'm sure you'll find some patient that's slightly less vegetative than others, and that patient should be treated differently. Likewise, if the patient doesn't have much of a brain left, there's not much left to do except console the family and deal with the end of life issues.

So the determination of life in comatose patients is important. But faking communication with a comatose patient is harmful.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 10:22 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.