Sleeping Pills Wake Up Patients in Coma.

British and South African doctors discovered that you can actually rouse semi-comatose patients by giving them sleeping pills!

British and South African doctors have reported the cases of three semi-comatose patients who were revived for several hours at a time by zolpidem, marketed to millions of insomniacs under the brand name Ambien. The drug allows the semi-comatose patients to talk with friends and family for several hours before the effect wears off …

"The effect is amazing to say the least," says Ralf Clauss of the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, UK, who discovered it along with his colleague Wally Nel of the Family Practice in Pollack Park, Springs, South Africa. "They can interact, make jokes and speak on the phone." One of them even mastered catching a baseball.

The treatment was a chance discovery, Clauss says. He recalls that one of the vegitative patients was experiencing restless movements, and that Nel was trying to calm them with the use of a sleeping pill. "Lo and behold, he woke up 15 minutes later," says Clauss. "And so now we’re using a sleeping drug to wake people up in the morning."

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