Reborn Coma Man’s Words May Be Bogus

November 23rd it was discovered that a man named Rom Houben was misdiagnosed after a car accident that was thought to have put him into a deep coma. For 23 years he was actually conscious but unable to communicate. “I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me, it was my second birth,” Mr. Houben, now 46, was quoted as saying (Castle).

Now, scientists are debating weather or not he was actually telling his story or not. Rom Houben’s account of his ordeal, repeated in news stories since appearing in Der Spiegel, appears to be delivered with assistance from an aide who helps guide his finger to letters on a flat computer keyboard. Called “facilitated communication,” that technique has been widely discredited, and is not considered scientifically valid. “If facilitated communication is part of this, and it appears to be, then I don’t trust it,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. “I’m not saying the whole thing is a hoax, but somebody ought to be checking this in greater detail. Any time facilitated communication of any sort is involved, red flags fly” (Keim).

Houben has since proven able to answer yes-or-no questions with slight movements of his foot. It’s a tremendous accomplishment, and raises the chilling possibility that as many as four in 10 people considered utterly comatose may be misdiagnosed.

It was a lucky coincidence. Steven Laureys, a Belgian neurologist, had heard about the case. Laureys, who heads the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege, had long suspected that many patients who are in a coma are in fact conscious, at least intermittently, but that their awareness goes undetected. When Laureys pushed the man into an MRI tube, large areas of the brain were lit up on the monitor. The cerebrum, with its gray matter, was apparently only slightly damaged, leading Laureys to the conclusion that the mind of the man in the seemingly empty shell of a body was in fact largely intact (Dworschak).

However, although he can communicate with movements of his foot, people are still very skeptical "You see this woman who’s not only holding his hand, but what she’s doing is directing his fingers and looking directly at the keyboard. She’s pressing down on the keyboard, pressing messages for him. He has nothing to do with it.” Facilitated communication could only be considered credible if the facilitator didn’t look at the keyboard or screen while supporting Houben’s hand, and helped him type messages in response to questions she had not heard, thus ensuring that Houben’s responses are entirely his own (Dworschak).

Houben survived by learning to live with the small amount of information that had remained accessible to his senses. He studied the goings-on in his nursing home as painstakingly , the quirky mannerisms of his fellow patients in the common room, the doctors' appearances in his room and the chatter of the nurses, who had no qualms about saying whatever they wanted to in front of Houben, who was supposedly incapable of hearing them. "It made me an expert on human relations," Houben writes (Keim).


Sources:

Castle, Stephen. "Misdiagnosed With Coma, Belgian Man Communicates After 23 Years." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 23 Nov. 2009. Web. 03 Dec. 2009.

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Dworschak, Manfred. "'My Second Birth': Discovering Life in Vegetative Patients." SPIEGEL ONLINE. 25 Nov. 2009. Web. 03 Dec. 2009.

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Keim, Brandon. "Reborn Coma Man’s Words May Be Bogus." Wired News. 24 Nov. 2009. Web. 03 Dec. 2009.

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