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Several months ago major news sites reported that a Belgian man, paralyzed for 23 years and supposedly in a vegetative state, was interacting with caregivers through the use of “facilitated communication.” James Randi and other skeptics raised questions about the validity of the technique.
Faculty from the Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital are now reporting that subsequent controlled studies have failed to confirm the initial findings.
Dr Steven Laureys, one of the doctors treating him, acknowledged that his patient could not make himself understood after all. Facilitated communication, the technique said to have made Houben’s apparent contact with the outside world possible, did not work, Laureys declared. “We did not have all the facts before,” he said. “To me, it’s enough to say that this method doesn’t work.”
In the recent studies a facilitator, who helped the patient type answers on a computer screen, was not present when the test objects and words were presented to Mr. Houben.
Links at NPR and The Guardian.
Previously on Neatorama: Is This Man Fully Alert and Communicating – or Not? (with video of facilitated communication). Photo credit AFP/Getty Images.
Twenty three years ago, a car crash left Rom Houben totally paralyzed. Doctors gave him a battery of tests and concluded that he was in a vegetative state or a coma. Except that they were wrong: he was conscious the whole time but unable to tell anyone about it.
‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,’ said Mr Houben, now 46.
Doctors used a range of coma tests, recognised worldwide, before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was ‘extinct’.
But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.
Mr Houben describes the moment as ‘my second birth’.
