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Brain Electrodes Help Injured Man To Speak Again
An anonymous reader writes "A man beaten and left for dead has recovered the power of speech thanks to the use of electrodes to stimulate brain activity. 'Experts called the results encouraging but cautioned that the experimental treatment must be tried in more patients before its value can be assessed. The researchers are already proceeding with a larger study. Before the electrodes were implanted, the man was in what doctors call a "minimally conscious state." That means he showed only occasional awareness of himself and his environment. In a coma or vegetative state, by contrast, patients show no outward signs of awareness.'"
I think that within my lifetime (21 yrs old), medical advancements will transcend what is historically possible with medicine. If not for this experiment, a doctor would have told this guy's parents to read-up on making their house handicapped accessable, and learning about strategies for caring for the tramatically brain-injured.
Medicine is whack. 90% of the time (admittedly bullshit statistic) doctors literally put band-aids on patients, tell them that life is painful, and send them on their way. I used to process medical documents into an EMR system, and although I am not medically trained, the most common solutions to back-pain seemed to be life-style changes, dope (perscription opiates), and invasive (life-threatening) surgery.
I have often wondered if, in the future, it will be possible to get a brain-implant that shuts off offending portions of the CNS. Instead of adjusting the body to deal with mental anguish (pain), why not adjust the body. I'm hoping by the time I need back-surgery for the 2 broken disc that are giving me pain already, it is going to be brain-surgery instead.
Any medical professionals care to share the feasability of brain-implants as a way of treating pain or other conditions not limited to the CNS, as TFA suggests the tech's use is for?
No.
In Schiavo's case, the autopsy was conclusive. Her brain was horribly atrophied; there was little left beyond the brain stem, which only provides the bare minimum life support functions. Parts of her cerebrum had literally turned to mush. No medical treatment, up to and including science fiction ideas like tissue regeneration, could have properly revived her - there was nothing left of her prior self, in terms of the important stuff like memory, or identity.
At best, some techno-magical resurrection, should such a thing be possible one day, could have left her with an blank infant's mind in an already old body, and bluntly, that sounds every bit like a fate worse than death to me.
Really, the only reason why everyone remembers Terri (and not the many other vegetables whose relatives face the difficult choice of either holding out hope indefinitely or pulling the plug) is that her case got political. Medically, she was not out of the ordinary, and it was pretty clear long before the case ever made it to the public eye that she wasn't coming back. People who've lost most of their brain aren't expected to recover, and since their prognosis worsens over time (due to atrophy), there is little chance of medical science yielding some miracle cure that could help them.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Please read the article next time.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
...that it's possible to get a man to start speaking by implanting electrodes.
Now can we develop a cell phone that will implant the electrodes on its own, to get people to stop talking?
Wait, I'm confused. Are we talking about an average Microsoft customer, or a mugging victim? (possibly one and the same)
You're letting your religious beliefs and emotional need to believe something, whether it's true or not, get in the way of the facts. I remember a discussion once about sf spaceships and how scientists have said that it is not possible to go faster than light speed and someone said, "Yeah, but they kept saying it wasn't possible to go faster than sound." The two statements are entirely unrelated. There wasn't "proof" about faster than sound travel. As far was what science can and cannot do, her memories, her personality, everything that made her who she was was lost. Without that, she could never be who she was. That is not an issue of "until recently they thought..." reasoning.
You might want to read up on logic and reasoning and how they are used in debate and discussion because you are making arguments without any basis other than your own beliefs. You are basing your comments on what you want and not on facts or reason.
Actually, that is not the case. If you'll read the article, you'll see that the patient could in fact communicate, albeit in a limited way, before the treatment. He was crippled, but his mind was still there.
If you want an analogy, think of a human being as a computer. This guy, in TFA, had a broken sound card - they fixed it. Terri Schiavo had a broken hard drive - one that wasn't just damaged, but was in fact melted. Assuming the damage could have been repaired, what of the data lost? It's not like we had a backup copy of her mind, her memories, or the other aspects of her identity.
There are bound to be cases where we can argue till the cows come home how much of the mind is left. Hers wasn't one of them. Where the forebrain should have been, there was cerebrospinal fluid. There was nothing left. Her case does not compare with the case in TFA.
Now, one day we may be able to repair that kind of damage. But unless we also develop a method for backing up our minds, the way we back up data on a computer, then such a miracle treatment will not restore the patient to who they were.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
"And until recently, that's what "medicine" and "science" thought was the case with the young man in the story. "
No, and why is it that many people automatically assume that "anything is possible" given enough time. People in that type of coma are known to wake up after months, even years, but medicine has not found much in the way of a reliable way to wake them up. He had "moments" where he was consious of his surroundings so the sugreons knew he was capable of responding when they tickled the right neurons. If the nerons are dead from lack of blood/oxygen, nothing short of resurection technology will bring them back and as the GP pointed out this would probably mean the patients "life" would start from scratch.
Besides if "medicine" and "science" thought it was impossible then why did they bother trying it out on this guy?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And until recently, that's what "medicine" and "science" thought was the case with the young man in the story.
But now he's up and talking.
Think about it.
Should we then freeze dry everyone that dies. you know just in case?
I've had 2 friend that have been in a coma. 1 was thought to have been brain dead and fortunately the doctors were wrong and her mother screaming bloody murder when they pulled her off the respirator (miscommunication due to a language barrier) was the right choice. The choice is there for the families. It's easier in some situation then others. But your statement is bordering on the ridiculous. Think about it? We have to work with the information we have now. Perhaps one day they will have a cure for 47 deep stab wounds. Perhaps not. Perhaps he's a vegetable perhaps not. But we can't work with what might be possible in the future.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I can confirm this experimentally. Inspired by this development, I implanted electrodes into a bowl of tomato soup. No amount of deep electrical stimulation could bring the soup into anything we could recognize as consciousness, nor was its ability to communicate improved.
Possibly the failure of the deep electrical stimulation to elicit the desired response has something to do with the vegetative state of the tomatoes that were used to make the soup. With this in mind, I am going to be conducting further experiments using a crab bisque.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
... and crush their skulls as badly as they did to this guy.
Then we could use them as experimental subjects to develop a reliable treatment for others. If the treatment makes them recover, send them to prison for more beatings. Rinse and repeat.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
"Owww! Ouch! Aaargh! Stop shocking my braiAAAAAAAaargh! Bastards!"
What I find really interesting in such stories is that it helps fight the idea that the brain is a monolithic black box that is either on or off. This story is already a few days old and I have found sources when it says that the guy was brought back from coma thanks to electrodes. The fact is, that he never were in coma, he had a minimal set of brain function activated, occasionally he would say "yes" or "no" to simple questions but was not autonomous at all, his conscious "drive" completely gone. Now an electrodes pulses in the zone of the brain associated to consciousness but he still is not the same person as he was. Some memories are back, he can talk again, move again (I suppose in a wheelchair, I read somewhere he won't be able to walk again before several years) and has some desires again.
But having reading headlines about this story shows how uncomfortable people are with the notion that some part of your brain can be switched off without living you dead, just... different.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If someone is brain dead and nothing, then it doesnt matter, they are zippo , but ultimately, a person by marriage
is at most 25% as important as genetic parents.
Is it possible to form a corporation between your self and parents to give them more rights than your partner?
Well said. I was appalled when I heard that her ex had the power to end her life. It's tragic.
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber" -- Plato
Mutations in DNA are not responsible for cancer. Cancer is the result of the cellular machinery that regulates mitosis going wonky. The best hypothesis that I have heard is that the telomeres that regulate the number of times a cell can replicate its DNA lose count or go into an endless loop. The DNA itself in a cancerous cell may or not be mutated from the original DNA of the organism, it is not related to the cancer itself. A cell with DNA identical to the original zygote of the organism may still go cancerous.
My own personal theory is that there is no cure for cancer and there never will be. Cancer is defined as uncontrolled growth, which is pretty damn close to a perfect definition of life itself. The ability to heal - regeneration of tissues like skin epidermis, stomach epithelial cells, and many other regenerative tissues in the body are constantly walking the fine line on the edge of cancer. In my opinion a cure for cancer is guaranteed death, I prefer the ability to heal and digest food with the risk of cancer that must come with these abilities.
P.S. The strongest carcinogen known to man is estrogen. Seriously. All anthropogenic contaminants that are carcinogenic are xenoestrogenic in their biological activity. This is consistent with my theory that cancer is an inevitable side effect of life and in fact integral to the machinery of life itself.
You're running a big risk there. If you stare into a bisque long enough the bisque stares back at you.
No, actually according to TFA, this technique has been tried with varying success before, and "He noted that a similar treatment did not help Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a vegetative state whose care triggered national controversy before her death in 2005. That's the typical outcome for electrical brain stimulation in vegetative states, he said."
Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegative state, from which there is virtually no hope of recovering if it persists for a year or two. The subject of TFA was in a minimally concious state, from which varying degrees of spontaneous recovery is not unknown (though eventual death before any recovery is not uncommon either).
Unfortunately, this technology is somewhat limited right now, allowing the patient only to express "yes" and "no" as one and two beeps, respectively. The next implementation of the device will be somewhat more expressive, allowing the patient to express abstract concepts such as "guilty" and "double guilty."
I once shot a man in Reno 'cause they cancelled Firefly.