Associated Press
Rom Houben, with the help of speech therapist Linda Wouters, uses his touch screen to communicate during an interview.
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23-year coma victim talking, or no?
Local prof says method "discredited"
BRUSSELS - With a caretaker holding his hand, a Belgian man who was diagnosed as comatose for 23 years typed out a message yesterday that he felt reborn after decades of loneliness and frustration.
A leading bioethicist from the University of Pennsylvania, however, expressed skepticism that the man was truly communicating on his own.
Car-crash victim Rom Houben was diagnosed as being in a vegetative state but appears to have been conscious the whole time, doctors in Belgium said. An expert using a specialized type of brain scan that was not available in the 1980s says he finally realized that Houben was conscious, and provided him with the equipment to communicate.
Assisted by a speech therapist who rapidly moved his finger letter by letter along a touch-screen keyboard, Houben told AP Television News that years of being unable to move or communicate left him feeling "alone, lonely, frustrated, but also blessed with my family."
The therapist, Linda Wouters, told APTN that she can feel Houben guiding her hand with gentle pressure from his fingers, and that she feels him objecting when she moves his hand toward an incorrect letter.
"It was especially frustrating when my family needed me. I could not share in their sorrow. We could not give each other support," Houben wrote during the interview at the 't Weyerke institute in eastern Belgium.
"Just imagine. You hear, see, feel and think but no one can see that. You undergo things. You cannot participate in life."
Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at Penn, said he was skeptical of Houben's ability to communicate after seeing video of his hand being moved along the keyboard.
"That's called 'facilitated communication,' " Caplan said. "That is ouija board stuff. It's been discredited time and time again. When people look at it, it's usually the person doing the pointing who's doing the messages, not the person they claim they are helping."
Caplan also said that the statements Houben allegedly made with the computer seem unnatural for someone with such a profound injury and an inability to communicate for decades.
Asked how he felt when his consciousness was discovered, Houben responded through the aide that: "I especially felt relief. Finally be able to show that I was indeed there."
"Just like with a baby, it happens with a lot of stumbling," he wrote.
The doctor who discovered that Houben had been wrongly diagnosed said that he was re-examining dozens of other cases.
Dr. Steven Laureys said that he has discovered some degree of consciousness using state-of-the-art equipment in other patients but won't say how many. He looks at about 50 cases from around the world every year but none is as extreme as that of Rom Houben, who was fully conscious inside a paralyzed body. Many center on the fine distinction between a vegetative state and minimal consciousness.
He said yesterday that "it is very difficult to tell the difference."
His studies showed that some 40 percent of patients with consciousness disorders are wrongly given a diagnosis of a vegetative state.
"It is clearly unacceptable," Laureys said.
