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Patient "Roused From Coma" By a Magnetic Therapy
missb writes "Could the gentle currents from a fluctuating magnetic field be used to reverse the effects of traumatic brain injury? New Scientist reports on a patient in the US who was in a coma-like state, but can now speak very simple words after being given transcranial magnetic stimulation. This is the first time TMS has been used as a therapy to try and rouse a patient out of a coma."
Who ever wrote TFS (possibly also TFA) should be made to write "Correlation does not imply causation" 100 times on the blackboard.
This does not mean that the magnetic therapy woke the patient from the coma. It merits examining the possibility correlation, but it does not by any means a proof this therapy had any hand in waking the patient from the coma.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Oh great... Who wants to bet the Q-Ray braclet is going to see a resurgence in popularity...
She better hope he wasn't a Star Trek fan.
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I hear those coma fantasies can be pretty kick ass.
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i own a Q-Ray bracelet you insensitive clod! it helps me tune my tinfoil hat to deflect the optimum amount of cosmic mind control rays. plus, it works in tandem using its special magnet powers to amplify the readings taken by my e-meter and channels them into a special beacon to xenu.
Good people go to bed earlier.
read the first sentence of TFA
>> magnetic field be used to reverse the effects of traumatic brain injury?
I threw a magnet at my brother-in-law, after he drank all my beer. He's a lot smarter as a result. Now he sneaks out after the beer is gone.
You've never actually raised any children, have you? :)
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CmdrTaco is the first to sign up with the hopes of curing his erectile dysfunction.
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CowboyNeal crosses his fingers.
I think it's great that drunk drivers are being used for medical experimentation. Far better than tormenting innocent monkeys.
Not only drunk drivers, but all comatose people(then extend that idea to different medical trials on other ailments as well). Better to help advance medical science than to lay there and cost tremendous amounts of money doing nothing like Terry Schiavo did. Not that it was her fault, but you get the idea.
Am I the only person to find this somewhat distressing, that this guy's only words are "Help me". It sounds like there might be a conciousness present that realises things aren't right. Imagine how disturbing (terrifying?) that could be.
Smivs on the intertubes!
Now my crazy mother-in-law will use this as justification for the magic anti-cancer magnet bracelets she wears, and she will start pushing the rest of us to wear them again.
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1;
Too bad he can only repeat the words "Please. Kill. Me."
The article makes it seem like tinfoil hat stuff, but it's very, very interesting. When the frequency that the magnetic field fluctuates at is over 1000 hertz (I think that's the number) it increases the activity of the specific brain area it is aimed at. Below the cutoff it reduces the activity. Think just a moment, isn't it an incredibly ability to be able to activate or deactivate specific brain areas? I read somewhere that you can induce a feeling of "awe" or "being in the presence of God" with a magnetic field that covers one whole side of the brain. Does any of this sound like Nicola Tesla's lab that the government sealed immediately after his death? What if there were a home version? Just how difficult would it be to make one? What would couples do with it? What if church had one that would affect the whole congregation? What if the congregation didn't know about it? What if an interrogator had one?
If you want to know just how far this real science has come along so far, the topic to look up is TMS -- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
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Yeah wow lol.
Read a book. People use different words and spellings in different areas of the world.
Was "windscreen" equally funny to you?
I imagine "Kill me" would be a lot worse.
Oh great ... you just *know* this is coming up in the debate tonight
http://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+metallica+one
Trite pre-approved questions, pontification, teleprompters, empty promises, sound-bites, bullshit.
:)
All Americans with half a brain are so very tired of modern televised debates which showcase a sort of half-scripted reality TV monkey house bullshit.
I'll stick to reading from a variety of sources to decide for myself, thankyouverymuch
Damn, beaten :)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
This is big news for someone with a girlfriend in a coma!
You don't want to be treated at Johns Hopkins then. They have an acupuncture clinic and do some research around it.
Simple greetings and curses (from "Hi!" to "Fuck you!") can be considered reflex speech. That's usually seen at the early stages of recovery, post left hemisphere stroke, for example.
"Help me", although phonetically and grammatically simple, doesn't, as far as I know fall in this automatic speech patterns (I'm in neurology and neuroscience, but I don't work on rehabilitation, so I could be wrong).
Even if it's reflex speech, that subject had been completely unresponsive and uncomunicative for eight month. He had recovered a sleep-wake cycle, which qualifies him for permanent vegetative state (PVS), one step ahead of coma, but not very far on the way to getting better.
He's now in a minimally conscious state (MCS, basically: conscious some of the time but severely retarded). This is a significant step, since patients in MCS have a better recovery chance than people in PVS.
Whether or not the progress is related to rTMS is to be seen, but since the procedure is very straighforward, it shouldn't last long before conclusions are drawn from larger studies.
"I think it's great that drunk drivers are being used for medical experimentation. Far better than tormenting innocent monkeys."
Since fatigued drivers cause more road deaths a year than drunk drivers we should experiment on them too. And since distracted drivers are the number one cause of road deaths we should experiment on all of them.
People make bad decisions all the time and doing something bad to them doesn't make a right
Good song, inspired by: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun
The article fails to mention that the patient went into a coma after hearing the news about the $800 billion bailout to screw the American public.
So they degaussed his head?
Crap, does that mean I am going to have to pay more for a degausser now?
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
...your tin foil hats aren't going to stop their mind control electromagnets from turning ya'll into their bitches, suckers!
You'll need my double-naught Jethro Bodine style IRON SPY HAT to block those magnetic waves... ...and I just happen to have an ample supply of these for sale at a fair price!
It doesn't matter what source you use. Both major-party candidates are the type of people who want votes from the half-brained TV watchers. The candidates would rather be elected and reelected by those people than to see the state of discourse improved. So long as that's the case, the candidates are part of the problem.
"gentle currents from a fluctuating magnetic field"
TMS is not gentle. Even the latest, most focused but least powerful, ones cause such a mechanical strain on the mechanism when they fire, that they sound like a firecracker.
There is still a maximum amount allowed because too much causes headaches, then convulsions. TMS is a gentle ball peen hammer.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If I am in an unresponsive coma, and the best you can do is to wake me up enough to grunt and say 'help me' for the rest of my life, DONT WAKE ME UP, ASSHOLE.
While this seems to be cutting edge nearosurgery(look it up on pubmed.com) It is not the same thing as wearing magnets, standing around some magnets. This seem to be a very specific situation.
People hawking magic crap will site this as the same thing, it is not.
I only looked at three studies, but none of them were blinded.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
and i'll build my own TMS using NIBs (Neodymium magnet) that can be found in hard disk. I'd better find Magneto now...
The White House has requested a set for "further study". I guess they want to wake George up so he can go home.
Um, cite? All the stats I've seen have attributed US alcohol related driving deaths at around 50%.
I predicted when I saw this that the therapy was being carried out over a long period of time, and that it could therefore easily have been a coincidence that he was doing the therapy at the time. low and behold, I read the article and what do I find? He started to wake up after the 15TH SESSION. So, I tested my theory and it passes occums razer (all it assumes is that some people wake up from commas on their own). I have now applied more scientific reasoning than whoever wrote this article. CORELLATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!!!!!!!!! also, read this snippet "After the 30 planned sessions the TMS was stopped. Without it, Villa became very tired and his condition declined a little, but he was still much better than before. Six weeks later he was given another 10 sessions, but there were no further improvements and he was sent home, where he remains today." again, the first part is pretty plausible coincidence (if it is even true) and the second show a non-effect of the therapy. Why would it cease to help when it was before they stopped treatment? even better, WHY WOULD IT WORK AT ALL? Now, if they did a clinical trial, then we might start to get some real evidence.
"Correlation does not imply causation"
GAAAAAAAAH! Can you knee-jerk idiots just shut the hell up?
Learning to parrot a phrase does not make you smart.
1) A report of correlation is not a claim of proven causation
2) Observed correlation is the primary means of discovering causation.
People like you should be forced to write those two nuggets a thousand times across your fucking foreheads.
The saying you're regurgitating is meant to protect against overconfidence and rash conclusions. Using it to dismiss any and all observed correlations as irrelevant would lay science to waste. Correlation does imply that there might be something worth investigating unlesss there are strong arguments it can't be so. Unproven but fairly consistent correlations constitutes a lot of our understanding of the world, even within science. Of course you don't take it as gospel, science is all about never doing that. But you do have to be able to work with an build on information with less than 100% certainty in order to get anywhere. You just have to keep track of the uncertainty.
sudo ergo sum
It's for that exact reason that I've left strict instructions with my family that I am not to be kept on life-support if I sustain brain injury. Being in a state like this scares me far more than death, even though I'm an atheist and don't believe in any form of after-life.