Anyone who reads news sites or watches the news on TV has probably heard about the 'horrible' story of the man trapped in a coma for 23 years who was actually conscious the whole time:
Man says emergence from coma like rebirth - More health news- msnbc.com
Quote:
BRUSSELS - A Belgian man wrongly diagnosed as vegetative for 23 years told The Associated Press Tuesday that the discovery he was fully conscious brought him a feeling of rebirth after decades of loneliness and frustration.
Car-crash victim Rom Houben was diagnosed as being in a vegetative state but appears to have been conscious the whole time. An expert using a specialized type of brain scan that was not available in the 1980s finally realized it and provided him with the equipment to communicate.
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I saw the original clip on the news, and was extremely dubious, so looked it up and found that article, which mentions briefly that this could all be a scam, although the rest of the article basically seems to gloss over this fact:
Quote:
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."
Caplan also said the statements Houben allegedly made with the computer seem unnatural for someone with such a profound injury and an inability to communicate for decades.
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James Randi weighs in pretty heavily on the "This is total crap" side:
Quote:
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This is yet another obvious example of abysmal, practiced, purposeful ignorance by medical personnel - including Dr. Snyderman and her staff who prepared this piece. I cannot understand how anyone, professional medical person or layman, can continue to believe that the farce known as "Facilitated Communication" [FC] represents anything other than a fantasy that was begun back in 1977
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This Cruel Farce Has To Stop!
What do you guys think? Has this guy actually been trapped in a coma for 23 years and is now communicating? Is the 'facilitated communications' person perpetrating a malicious scam, honestly facilitating communicating, or just subject to some sort of Ouiji board effect, where she believes on some level he actually is communicating through her?