"It Was My Second Birth"

(CBS)  Updated 5:51 p.m. EST

For 23 years, doctors believed a man in Belgium was in a vegetative state, barely able to move or think after a car crash.

Then, doctors studying patients who appeared to be completely unresponsive made a stunning discovery: Rom Houben was in fact awake.

Dr. Steven Laureys of the University of Liege's Coma Science Group, decided to take another look at Houben's brain using the latest imaging technology.

"We put him in the PET scanner, the MRFI," Dr. Laureys told CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer, "and then we saw his brain was functioning normally, so he was not vegetative."

For more than two decades, Houben had apparently heard and understood everything going on around him.

Now, the challenge was to let him communicate.

A caretaker was trained to interpret the tiny movements Houben makes at the keyboard to spell out sentences.

In an interview with the German magazine Der Speigel and reported on by the U.K.'s Daily Mail, Houben wrote that "I screamed, but there was nothing to hear."

For Houben, now 46, it was a liberation.

"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was really wrong with me - it was my second birth," he wrote.

"All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt. . . . I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer, and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead."

A leading bioethicist, however, expressed skepticism that the man was truly communicating on his own.

Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press he is 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 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."


Rom's mother Fima, proud to show photos of him before the accident, never stopped believing he was conscious.

"He couldn't communicate, but I knew," she said. "I could tell when he was in a bad mood, or when he was in pain."

It was a mother's diagnosis that turned out to be right, even though this patient had to wait more than two decades for medical science to agree.

Dr. Laurey's discovery took place three years ago but recently came to light on the publication of a study on the misdiagnosis of people with consciousness disorders.

(AP Photo/Yves Logghe)

Houben's case is exceptional because his brain function was so intact, but Dr. Laurey's study has shown that 40 percent of the vegetative patients he looked at had been misdiagnosed.

(Left: A patient is examined during a scan at the University Hospital in Liege, Belgium, Nov. 24, 2009.)

CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton said there are a few reasons why patients believed to be in a persistent vegetative state are misdiagnosed:

"The actual testing could be flawed, or the interpretation of that testing could be flawed. The other thing is they can start to begin a recovery - this usually follows a traumatic brain injury and there can be recovery that happens - it could happen months or years later," she said on CBS' "The Early Show."


For more info:
"Diagnostic Accuracy of the Vegetative and Minimally Conscious State" - BMC Neurology (07.09)

[DHXK3G]

Well said, Schnitzel0001!

But not looking? Heck, he wasn't even awake! "Reporter" Elizabeth Palmer is clearly an idiot, and CBS "News" shows their ignorance employing her! Even the PBS investigative show FRONTLINE proves that it is bogus: http://******/8hdOId 45 seconds in, someone says that it's a sham.

I have no doubt that there are some sort of brain waves going on, and maybe even thoughts. But James Randi showed FC as a hoax. Per the FRONTLINE show, with so much technology, why is another person needed for FC as a means of expression?

Wake up, become educated and think for yourselves, people! Don't trust the poor "news" reporting tactics of hacks like "reporter" Elizabeth Palmer!

[dboatrig]

I agree, this is a case of "facilitated communication," or "FC," wherein the trained assistant is actually answering the questions for the patient. The deception is either intentional, or subliminal, much like a ouija board. People want so hard to believe, but honest objective journalism would question this as a probable fraud. PBS Frontline did a program on this topic in 1993...sad but interesting.

[John_Merritt]

I remeMber a kid who was in a motocycle accident and in a coma for a couple of weeks. I would go in and check on him every other day even though he did not have medical tests. I would go in and talk to him, and I remember the nurses would tell me, "He can't hear anything, he does not respond to any stimulus." I would laugh at them, and told em' they were wrong, he could hear everything they said.

Two weeks into his coma he woke up. And guess what? He heard EVERYTHING that was said in the room, including all the juicy details of some of the nurses dates and boy were they shocked. Shortly thereafter they started having meetings with all employee's about discussing matters not material to patient care anymore.

That kid and I laughed over that for awhile. He guess he heard quite a few things. There was one nurse he was particular interested in, I guess she had some pretty good escapades she blabbed about in front of this 'comatose' patient.

[jsf14]

The communication is very suspect, but what about those brain scans? Are they replicable? Any competent scan of that particular brain on any good equipment should be able to find the same activity. Soes this doctor say he knows something about scanning that no one else knows?

[lakeycreek]

This "facilitated communication" scam has been debunked so many times that any journalist who is not in a coma would do a little fact checking before reporting this as straight news. What do you think happens when the patient is asked a question that the "trained caretaker" does not know the answer to?

[kristin8501]

sorry but i think this is a load of you know what. so this interpreter is trained to watch his movements at the keyboard and guess what he is trying to say? the man's eyes were closed!! this is giving the family false hope.

[endurorob_5]

O.K. I watched the video of this. He was just lying with his eyes closed and his "assistant" was typing away with his finger. How is this interpreted as him communicating. Don't want to be the big pesimist but this looks like B.S. to me.

[usatexan]

Since he was in neither state, I wonder why the doctor even stated "we knew he was not in a vegetative state", he was totally conscious!! How absolutely agonizing for someone to experience. And their study showed a 40% error in misdiagnoses!

[djrasmu]

Your story confuses the two states that Houben was not in. There are important differences between a coma and a vegetative state.