Thousands of coma patients may be conscious
sciencefocus.com
sciencefocus.com
I suffered an incomplete (cervical) spinal cord injury years ago.
Through my 'medical journey' and many many months in the ICU before rehab I was placed on a variety of amnesiacs, as well as induced comas.
I remember a lot of things that I really shouldn't -- and I can corroborate the events with eyewitnesses who were otherwise healthy spectators.
I was terrified, unable to communicate, uncomfortable, and most of the time in pain.
When I was finally brought back to 'real' consciousness I had tubes in every orifice, a new tracheotomy, a new HALO drilled into my skull, the inability to speak and the inability to move my arms -- through no ones direct fault my only means of communication , my voice , was taken from me while I was pharmaceutically inebriated and unable to consent -- an emergency action that was medically required.
I eventually regained enough upper limb movement to communicate with a small whiteboard and soft erase markers while in the medical facilities. When the trach was finally removed I regained most of my voice within months of therapy, but the memories and experience still haunt me.
I sincerely hope that we learn enough about human consciousness at some point to allow us to better manage patient awareness and memory forming through trauma -- I think that the medical industry as a whole kind of pushes 'medical PTSD' out of the public arena of consideration as something that is 'required, known, but terrible.' -- but I hope we one day come up with real methods of reducing or preventing that kind of experience all together.
It feels that at this point we're much more adroit at healing bodies than psyches.
Part of me wonders if the real reason the US has such low vaccination rates is because of the amount of medical trauma that everyone has experienced.
Talk about unintended consequences…
The wiki for the Unabomber has him traumatised as a child after treatment for hives.
If I'm ever incapacitated, I know the doctors can't say "let's not save this one. we could keep them alive, but it's better for everyone to not do that". That is insane to me, and it makes me deeply distrustful of the whole institution.
To give non-Americans a sense of how things work here: if a doctor suggests that you have surgery and it's not an immediate need, you should seek the opinion of several other professionals to see if you really need the surgery or if the doctor just likes doing that one. Also quackery like homeopathy and chiropractory is allowed in the open.
Smart Americans learn early which parts of the medical system can be trusted and how to get maximum benefit out of them. But I can see how someone might not want to go through all that effort, tune the whole thing out, and tune out vaccinations along with it.
I see this as a trauma response to knowing how abusive the system can be unless it's handled very delicately.
They absolutely can, if they know that that's what you would want and someone from your family isn't actively trying to stop them. That's why it's important for people to have DNRs and/or make their wishes known to multiple family members.
In France too, that is absolutely what I recommend. Never undergo a non-emergency potentially life-altering medical procedure without getting the opinion of at least another specialist. And also that if you go see a surgeon, their recommendation would almost always be a surgery, even if there are others, less invasive path of treatments.
There are indeed some Chiropractors who are quacks, and there are elements of the practice that are not understood well or even contravene our traditional understanding of science and medicine - however, if not for Chiropractors I’d have suffered needlessly. Visiting a Chiropractor and getting adjusted after Airborne operations has brought me back to full operational form. I woke up unable to turn my head on multiple occasions, getting adjusted was the only relief I got after my PCP’s only help was painkillers or the referral to the “quack” (as you put it).
It may be better to do the slow yoga approach, but there are times where I am in a lot of pain for days in a row. Having a trained professional to look at my body, find the tense areas and apply heat to loosen things up before giving it a good push seems like a valid mode of treatment for what can be debilitating pain. Similar results could probably be achieved from massage, but a masseuse will never give the joint a push to try to reset things, and in my non medical opinion it seems like that could be a useful treatment at times.
The whole basis of chiropractic is pseudoscience at best or actively rejecting the scientific method at worst. Part of what they do is likely effective for some. Studies suggest it's about as effective as massage, physical therapy or exercise.
Now, there are absolutely some "good" people in the industry that know and accept that chiropractic orthodoxy is pseudoscience, but nevertheless feel that spinal manipulation helps with some conditions and don't make grand claims or claim to be able to treat non-MSK conditions. It is probably unfair to describe those individuals as quacks. But textbook definition chiropractic as an industry is absolute nonsense.
As I said, studies do show it is as effective as other forms of manual therapy for MSK pain, which is to say it can be fairly effective.
I think it's probably the case in the USA that people call themselves chiropractors who, in other countries, would refer to themselves as physical therapists, because people know what chiropractors are. Sort of like branding. I've read about US having "evidence based chiropractors" who are, in effect, what in the UK would be called osteopaths - which is still alternative medicine but with far less woo than chiropractic.
I have been to chiropractors, osteopaths and others and did find it effective, but then I also found massage and physical therapy effective. I think just having someone really get in there to give your muscles a rub and crack your joints makes you feel good for some currently not known reason.
Thankfully the situation is slowly improving thanks to targeted work in specific communities [5], but still some work to do.
EDIT: sure, not directly related to parent's horrific experience, but similar theme: we've made great strides in the last few decades to treat the body, but still struggling to overcome the traumatic experiences some groups had in the recent past.
[1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletter-art...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/14/us/vaccine-ra...
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4843483/
[4] https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/a35483492/racial-bias...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/us/black-americans-vaccin...
I’m terrified of any new medication.
I do support vaccine in general, but it terrifies me. I had covid before it was available. So now it’s “why bother”
When my grandmother had a stroke, she was unable to speak for multiple days. She was able to hear and understand me and she was able to answer my questions by squeezing her right hand once or twice.
It was an horrible situation. When it happens, you understand that someone you loves can understand everything you say but can’t inform you of anything they wish.
I could not imagine the horror if you can’t even answer with yes or no and being surrounded by people who don’t know that you are here.
Btw, that’s some important discovery that we can communicate via MRI. It must have been a relief for those patients to be able to communicate.
Just draw letters on a big board and let the patient point at them. When it’s a possible solution, it is surprisingly efficient as you can guess orally and he “thumbs up” so he doesn’t have to spell everything out, and after a few tries you can tell stories. You can add bonus pictograms for ideas that repeat.
Thoughts to a fiend I cared for, a few days per week during his last months. After one night playing guitar, he never woke up, and I realized he went to sleep while we were singing him his own songs. What an enemy he was during life, he would have killed me if he knew my political opinions, but once he became weak and harmless and alone, no-one deserves to go alone. If only such people didn’t fight so much against the white christian male ceo archetype during their life… I hate life.
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While it seems highly likely that at least some “minimally conscious” patients do, in fact, have much greater interior consciousness than we might have thought, I also think that these stories tend to underemphasize the potentially fragmentary nature of consciousness.
A patient who is able to respond to commands to “visualize playing tennis” may be fully and completely conscious, with only a motor defect—or they might be much less conscious than that, but nonetheless able to process spoken commands and trigger relevant neural activity in response. From the few cases I’ve read, it seems like the bandwidth (so to speak) of the “imagine this if yes, that if no” method of communicating via fMRI is far too limited to draw conclusions about exactly what the interior experience of the patient is.
Not to say this research isn’t interesting. It’s fascinating. But I do sometimes think it makes the same sort of mistakes Benjamin Libet famously did, in making assumptions about the indivisibility of consciousness.
I suspect that the experiment is vulnerable to bias by an un-blinded scientist conducting the experiment. Almost all of these "veiled consciousness" and "assistive communication" reports are.
Consider that in most every dystopian sci-fi, there is always a faction somewhere - explicit or illicit - that refuses connection to the “net”. We have that even today with the Internet.
In the 19th century, master story teller Edgar Allen Poe exploited human fears in his stories, and the fear of being buried alive was no exception. In “Premature Burial," a short story first published in 1844, the narrator describes his struggle with things such as "attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to term catalepsy," an actual medical condition characterized by a death-like trance and rigidity to the body. The story focuses on the narrator’s fear of being buried alive and the corrective actions he takes to prevent it. He makes friends promise that they will not bury him prematurely, does not stray from his home, and builds a tomb with equipment allowing him to signal for help in case he should be buried alive only to wake from one of his episodes.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/people-feared-being...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29748259
While my mother was still aphasic, I was exploring ways to communicate with her and then it occurred to me that she was literate and numerate. At the time, I began writing questions with possible answer choices on a scratch paper and had her read them and select the answer she wanted by tapping her fingers on it. This is how I got to know how she was feeling, what she wanted for a breakfast etc. By the way, she is a technophobe.
I consider Elon Musk too unstable and unethical sociopath to trust that Neuralink would be used to better mankind, not just Elon Musk. The dude wants power.
A neural link could be thousands of times worse in terms of privacy invasion, addiction, and “rabbit hole effect” brainwashing than anything we have now. Phones and home assistants are invasive but they are not merging with our biology. One can put them down or disconnect them.
History has shown that overt malice or ill intent is not required for things to go evil either. All you need is perverse economic incentives and/or feedback loops leading to destructive emergent behaviors.
So no, absolutely not.
And in an off-line setting. But sadly, we're going a different route, into consumer-hostile XaaS model. With medical equipment, too.
So The Matrix but run by Zuckerberg instead of the machines? I'm having a hard time deciding which would be worse.
Before then, it was some fictional concept in a dystopian sci-fi novel. Now it's got Facebook--I mean Meta--all over it. So it's reasonable to bring this up when someone imagines the potential of neuralinking someone to the metaverse. It almost feels like the suggestion is making Zuckerberg's dream come true for him.
0. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
I feel like the complexity behind this idea is often lost in optimism about our current capabilities.
While Neuralink and other brain/computer interfaces should be developed (ideally in a non-invasive mode of operation) and have a wide range of possible uses in the future, i think that we're still decades if not centuries away from something like a "metaverse" of any kind.
Instead, currently instead of a simulated room (a la VRChat), it would probably be more like getting direct access to the spindles of a HDD and not really knowing much about the file system or the data on the drive, being able to write/read some arbitrary data and hope for the best.
If it were at all viable at the moment, you could probably communicate in a basic manner (e.g. morse code or yes/no) with someone who cannot utilize their muscles for whatever reason. This is still immensely useful, for example, in the cases as described in the article, but is still far off from immersive environments.
Or maybe my knowledge is out of date and there is promising research out there? Has anyone directly streamed video/3D environments or even pictures to someone's brain, maybe through the optical nerve? What about creating body sensations or interacting with one's sense of balance, or even smell/hearing?
It's probably still a viable approach, it's just that care should be taken to not disrupt the functionality of one's eyes whilst adding the necessary implant, which may or may not be doable, depending on the method.
Of course, the point about scar tissue is also a valid one.
The biggest problem is neural rewiring as response to the unnatural stimulus and ethics comitees.
Isn't Neurallink basically a fantasy at this point? In a similar vein, I can think of a lot of good early human applications for a teleporter as well.
Neurallink is a fantasy in terms of form factor, ease of use, and that specific teams ability to make something like this. The underlying technology exists but probably isn’t going to be ready for an application like this.
Even using the basics of left arm and right arm broadly you can establish communication by using dichotomous questioning.
> By changing his pattern of brain activity in the scanner to indicate a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, Scott was able to tell us that he knew where he was, how long he’d been there, what he enjoyed watching on TV, and whether or not he was in any pain (he wasn’t).
These questions are very open ended and it's difficult to guess how they were made. Is there a link to the paper? Did the person asking the questions know the correct answer? Did the person asking managing the fMRI know the correct answer? Did the person looking at the patterns know the correct answer?
The Count of Monte Cristo features an old man who can only communicate via eye blinks. At one point, he "spells" out words letter by letter by blinking a "Yes."
So, as lr4444lr implies, you could easily have someone "spell" out their birthplace. How does statistical reasoning enter into that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butter...
Although I did find myself wondering how he was going to get even with Danglars.
See the dead salmon fMR study for dangers of relying on it too much.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...
> Some people like to use the salmon study as proof that fMRI is woo, but this isn't the case, it's actually a study to show the importance of correcting your stats.
And
> The original poster almost didn't make it to a conference, but when it did, it made a major splash, and reactions were very positive.
And
> The authors note that at the time the poster was presented, between 25-40% of studies on fMRI being published were NOT using the corrected comparisons. But by the time this group won the Ignobel last week, that number had dropped to 10%. And who knows, it might, in part, be due to a dead fish.
Sounds like the salmon study is evidence of a field with a healthy attitude and improving statistical techniques rather than one that should be seen as discredited.
Actually, it'd be sad, because for all we know, dead people could have this limited consciousness without being able to communicate, just like the coma patients!
See also the "experiments" proving severed head remain conscious for 30 seconds (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6044102/beheading-experiments-... and https://unrealfacts.com/a-condemned-man-tried-to-keep-blinki... )
1. Atracurium blocks movement
2. Propofol blocks memory
3. Fentanyl blocks pain.
...on most patients [edit to remove PMI]
Not in any movie dramatizing the topic or the popular imagination.
Last I read, Medicare would pay for this -- perhaps at the request of relatives in denial? And so there's a "ventilator farm" industry, one that maintains a very low public profile.
Anyone with current inside knowledge here to clue in the rest of us?
This sounds like an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Unfortuantely I could not find any websites/articles on this topic. Do you have any links?
I thought it was established back then that this was a real phenomenon.
Agreed, should be mandatory!