I posted a couple days ago about Rom Houben, the Belgian man who was misdiagnosed as being in a coma for the last couple decades. Since then, the story has taken another interesting turn. Hauben described his experience to German magazine Der Spiegel using a method called “facilitated communication”, a method by which an assistant holds the individual’s hand and helps the individual type out messages on a keyboard. His recounting is quite vivid:
I became the witness to my own suffering, as doctors and nurses tried to speak to me and eventually gave up.
Facilitated communication is viewed with skepticism by many because it’s difficult to determine whether the assistant is simply assisting or actually typing out the messages for the individual. Most controlled studies have found facilitated communication to be unreliable and subject to the assistant conscious or unconscious influence. That isn’t to say that Houben isn’t self-aware. But it seems reasonable to wonder how articulate any of us would be after having no social interaction for the better part of a lifetime.
