Words of Man Thought to be 'Vegetable' Were False

Feb. 23, 2010— -- When the story broke in November that a paralyzed Belgian man, who had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state for 23 years supposedly typed words, people across the world were captivated.

"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me -- it was my second birth," 46-year-old Rom Houben supposedly told the German magazine Der Spiegel, communicating via a keyboard and an assistant.

Houben's doctors have now concluded those words were not his own, but say brain scans show activity and the diagnosis that he is in a vegetative state still appears to be wrong.

Immediately after Houben appeared in the media, skeptics cried foul over the facilitated communication method in which an assistant holds the hand of the paralyzed person over a keyboard and waits for slight movements as a signal to type.

According to a Feb. 20 interview with Agence France Presse, Houben's neurologist Dr. Steven Laureys said additional testing showed that facilitated communication indeed "did not work in the majority of cases."

For example, if an object was shown just to Houben while his assistant typist was out of the room, Houben could not describe it when the assistant came back to help him type. Critics of facilitated communication guess either slight involuntary movements are misinterpreted by the assistant, or assistants may even be intentionally speaking for the paralyzed.

Yet, brain scans still show that Houben's mind is far too active for him to be considered in a vegetative state. Now that his words typed out by facilitated communication have been debunked, exactly what Houben is thinking or how much he is thinking is still a mystery.

After Houben's car crash in 1983, doctors diagnosed him as being in a vegetative state -- meaning his brain is so damaged that he is incapable of conscious thoughts, but his brain stem is working well enough to keep him alive and for Houben to go through wake and sleep cycles.

As Dr. James L. Bernat of the American Academy of Neurology explained, "awake" can be different from "conscious."