“coma man” & facilitated communication
While I’m chilling at the Annual Scientific Assembly waiting for the next session to start, it seemed like as good a time as any to post some links about the story that’s been circulating in the mainstream media about a man who was thought to be in a coma for 23 years and his ‘miraculous’ discovery to be in a ‘locked-in’ state. In fact, supposedly he’s writing a book!
Of course, skeptical bloggers (Orac and Science-Based Medicine; even covered by Cory at BoingBoing) are all over this one. Seems he’s using ‘facilitated communication’ (where a ‘facilitator’ helps move his hand on a keyboard) to speak… but this has been discredited, showing that it’s really the facilitator speaking and not the coma man himself.
Sad that the MSM is pretty credulous about stories like this, not questioning even their own footage of the patient one-finger typing with his eyes closed…
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