September 12, 2006
REAWAKENED, NOT REBORN:
Reborn: We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state - doctors can only make a sufferer's last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking ... a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. (Steve Boggan, September 12, 2006, The Guardian)
For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, "Hello." Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.Three hundred miles away, Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as "a cabbage", greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.
Across the Atlantic in the United States, George Melendez, who is also brain-damaged, has lain twitching and moaning as if in agony for years, causing his parents unbearable grief. He, too, is given this little tablet and again, it's as if a light comes on. His father asks him if he is, indeed, in pain. "No," George smiles, and his family burst into tears.
It all sounds miraculous, you might think. And in a way, it is. But this is not a miracle medication, the result of groundbreaking neurological research. Instead, these awakenings have come as the result of an accidental discovery by a dedicated - and bewildered - GP. They have all woken up, paradoxically, after being given a commonly used sleeping pill.
Across three continents, brain-damaged patients are reporting remarkable improvements after taking a pill that should make them fall asleep but that, instead, appears to be waking up cells in their brains that were thought to have been dead. In the next two months, trials on patients are expected to begin in South Africa aimed at finding out exactly what is going on inside their heads. Because, at the moment, the results are baffling doctors.
And only a year and a half ago they were decrying the fundamentalism of those who don' think it right to kill these folks. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 12, 2006 8:45 AM
s/on
Delighted to learn that our own healthcare professionals are jumping up and down in glee and rushing off the give their own comatose/brain-dead patients a simple (and probably cheap) sleeping pill in the hopes they too will reawaken.
s/off
Wait you say. Never happen. I'm afraid you're right, but family members can't be stopped from trying the experiment themselves. The best of luck to those who have never given up.
Skeptical at first, but I found the peer-reviewed paper associated with this article, and it looks like the real deal. Too many questions that follow: Who'd have thought of giving a sleeping pill to comatose patients? How many have been allowed to die under the presumption that this sort of discovery wasn't possible? And how many more await? The Terry Schindler-Schiavo Foundation is all over this right now, and for good reason.
erp:
You're too pessimistic. The first case studies on this are 6 years old, but the Nel paper just came out this year, so in the medical community this story has only started to break. If we aren't hearing about reawakenings aplenty in the next year or two, feel free to make the same comment.
Posted by: M. at September 12, 2006 11:01 AM"And how many more await?" - referring to discoveries, not deaths. Oops.
Posted by: M. at September 12, 2006 11:02 AMOliver Sacks did something similar to this many years ago - it worked temporarily (on at least one patient), and then the effect faded.
Meanwhile, somewhere George Felos weeps. I've often wondered why he hasn't gone to Iraq - he could watch plenty of death there, and CNN/BBC would surely indulge him airtime to describe it.
Posted by: jim hamlen at September 12, 2006 11:24 AMSix years in this age of instant communication isn't a reason, it's not even a good excuse. A simple drug already available requiring no additional grant money. Not the way our medical establishment does things. How long will it take the FDA to approve treatment? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades?
If some comatose person who's already been pronounced all but dead suddenly really dies after this treatment, major law suits will be dancing in the eyes of the Breck Girl and his confreres.
Pessimistic. Why would I be otherwise?
Those of us of a certain age begin to view this "life-which-is-unworthy-of-life" business the same way children view abortion--a bit too close for comfort.
Posted by: Lou Gots at September 12, 2006 3:19 PMWell, Mr. Gots, it's a little late to complain of the killing spree when you see the knife coming for you........
Posted by: Robert Mitchell Jr. at September 12, 2006 5:35 PMDidn't the Democrats threaten that they would bring up the Schiavo case this fall to show GOPs abuse of govt. power to exploit Terry? I hope they carry out their threats.
Posted by: ic at September 12, 2006 5:37 PMLou Gots:
I believe my premature birth made me detest abortion ever since I was old enough to understand what it was. I'd seen the pictures of myself hooked up to tubes and generally in a wretched state. It was obvious nonsense to say that my location inside or outside a womb made a damn bit of difference as to my worthiness to continue living.
The experience also made my mother a pro-lifer as well. Get close enough to the frailty and beauty of human life, and the lies wither like a vampire struck by daylight.
Posted by: Matt Murphy at September 13, 2006 7:44 PM