Man "locked in" brain for 23 years

[Magical Realist]

This is amazing. What does one do when one is a pure passive awareness? What journeys are possible to you? What dreams may come? What hope of carrying on?

Rom Houbens was simply paralysed and had no way to let doctors caring for him what he was suffering.

"I dreamt myself away," says Houben, now 46, who was misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after a car crash.

Doctors and nurses in Zolder deemed him a hopeless case whereby his consciousness was considered "extinct".

The former martial arts enthusiast and engineering student was paralysed after a car crash in 1983. He was finally correctly diagnosed three years ago and his case has just come to light in a scientific paper released by the man who "saved" him.

Doctors treating him regularly examined him using the worldwide Glasgow Coma Scale which judges a patient according to eye, verbal and motor responses.

Rom Houben's new diagnosis won't give him his life back 30 Nov 2009

During every examination he was graded incorrectly. And so he suffered in silence, unable to communicate to his parents, his carers or the friends who came to his bedside that he was awake and aware at all times what was happening in his room.

Only the re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege brought to light that Houben was only paralysed all these years. Hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

Therapy has now enabled him to tap out messages on a computer screen and he has a special device above his bed enabling him to read books while lying down.

When he woke up after the accident he had lost control of his body, "I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," he says.

"I became a witness to my own suffering as doctors and nurses tried to speak with me until they gave up all hope.

"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me – it was my second birth. All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt."

The neurologist Steven Laureys who led the re-examination of Houben, published a study two months ago claiming vegetative state diagnosed patients are often misdiagnosed.

"Anyone who bears the stamp of 'unconscious' just one time hardly ever gets rid of it again," he said.
Laureys, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, discovered how Houbens' brain was still working using state-of-the-art imaging. He now intends to use the case of Houbens to highlight what he considers may be many more similar examples of misdiagnosis around the world.

He said: "In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury. About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health. But an estimated 3000 to 5000 people a year, remain trapped in an intermediate stage: they go on living without ever coming back again."

Houbens remains in constant care at a facility near Brussels."
========================================================================
Oops. Turns out Houbens may be nothing more than a human ouija board. They say he types without looking at the
keyboard. Hey, but I do that too!

http://www.livescience.com/5932-rom-houb...ation.html

[C C]

Oops. Turns out Houbens may be nothing more than a human ouija board. They say he types without looking at the keyboard. Hey, but I do that too! http://www.livescience.com/5932-rom-houb...ation.html

Back when it enjoyed a favored status, facilitated communication was an especially damaging pseudoscience racket because so many of its practitioners seemed to have either warped imaginations or paranoid obsessions with domestic sexual abuse. Outlandish numbers of parents, siblings, friends / neighbors, nurses, etc had their lives destroyed from these false accusations.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/.../1202.html

NARRATOR: [...] Despite the fact that there was no other evidence of abuse, the school, the social services and the police all believed that the words had come from Matthew, yet Gerry Gherardi protested complete innocence.

Mr. GHERARDI: I told Cathy, "There's got to be something wrong. It has to be happening someplace else. We have to call up the Autism Society in Washington and find out if they had any literature on facilitated communication and allegations of sexual abuse." When she called them up, they immediately sent us materials and in these materials it showed that it was happening all over the country.

NARRATOR: There were cases in California, in Texas, in Georgia, in Indiana, in Oklahoma, in New York. The accused included parents, teachers, care workers. Some, like Gerry Gherardi, had been forced to leave home. Some ended up in jail. Some parents had their children taken away. ["One afternoon the police arrived at my house to inform me that my daughter had [said through F/C] that she had been molested by my husband. They put her in foster care. Of course I couldn't know where because we were now a threat to her. I was frantic with worry. During her stay in foster care, she lost 10 pounds and suffered two black eyes. She had a severe ear infection which finally burst. Does it make sense that she never communicated to anyone [through F/C] that she was in pain ?"]

This is what happened last January to a family in southern Maine. Betsy Wheaton, a 17-year-old autistic girl, began using F/C at school in 1992. One day, using a letter board, Betsy and her facilitator wrote that everybody in her family -- her father, mother, grandparents and brother -- were sexually abusing her. Betsy and her brother were immediately put in foster care while the case was investigated.

The court appointed a local attorney, Phil Worden, as Betsy's legal guardian. Worden realized that this was more difficult than the usual abuse case. Before considering whether the allegations were true, the court had to decide a more fundamental question: was Betsy the author of the allegations or had they come from her facilitator?

PHIL WORDEN: I was most worried in my heart about were we going to do justice in this case? If the communications were real and she was being abused, the idea that on a legal technicality we might send the children back would be just absolutely horrible. On the other hand, if these were not real communications, the idea that all this would happen to this family and these children on a bogus idea was also unacceptable....

- - - - - - -

"Publication of controlled studies peaked in the 1990s with the near universal failure to validate the technique. The only positive studies are either testimonials, or very small poorly controlled experiments." http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?titl...munication