Vegetative patient Scott Routley says 'I'm not in pain'

[MachineGhost]

A Canadian man who was believed to have been in a vegetative state for more than a decade, has been able to tell scientists that he is not in any pain.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20268044

[WiseOne]

Maybe, maybe not.  One thing the article didn't mention is whether the patient could have been "locked-in".  These are patients who outwardly show no signs of awareness because they're paralyzed, but their minds are intact.  There are also syndromes caused by damage to frontal subcortical circuits bilaterally that can cause a patient to be very slow to respond or even unresponsive, but they may still be aware and cognitively otherwise intact. 

It's a bit irresponsible to claim that medical textbooks have to be rewritten based on results with a single patient who may not have been thoroughly evaluated.  Not to mention that fMRI is one of the worst scientific methods ever developed - I usually refer to it as "blob-ology".  It is a nightmare of false positive results from multiple comparisons.  Also, there are cognitive responses, like the P300 evoked potential, that can be detected even if a patient is anesthetized.  All these guys had to do was ask enough questions, and one would come out showing a positive response just by pure chance.

I'll wait for the Nature Medicine paper, thanks.  The BBC is a little too uncritical of an audience.

[notsheigetz]

The scientific breakthrough is amazing. But I have to ask: Does this patient have ANY quality of life? And if he could communicate to them that it was his choice to no longer be kept alive artificially, would they pull the plug?

He is alive and he has no pain. Just how DO you rate that on the quality of life meter?

[Pointedstick]

I woudn't want to be like that, either. Why don't they ask him? If he can say he's not in pain, surely they could ask him if he wants to keep going like that, no?