Sometimes the rocket scientists get it wrong. Very wrong! For years I have worked with patients who have brain injuries: Severe, mild and something in between. Those in coma, those in “PVS” and the like. The injuries have been caused by auto accidents, drug overdoses, hit and runs, poisonous insect bites…stroke due to malnutrition…and some for no known reason. Almost all of these patients have woken up from their comas and moved on to a better life. Not the life they once had, but close to it.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Advanced brain scanning uncovered startling signs of awareness in a woman in a vegetative state, British scientists reported Thursday – a finding that complicates one of medicine’s ethical minefields.

The work is sure to elicit pleas from families desperate to know if loved ones deemed beyond medical help have brain activity that doctors don’t suspect. “Can he or she hear and understand me?” is a universal question.

It’s far too soon to raise hopes, the British researchers and U.S. brain specialists stress. There’s no way to know if this 23-year-old woman, brain-damaged over a year ago, will recover, and therefore if her brain activity meant anything medically. Her brain injury may not be typical of patients in a vegetative state.

Families deserve to know what is possible, and they also need to know what is normal. The problem is, we don’t know. There is no typical brain injury. Every episode is different. Sure, much of the medical and nursing care is routine. We have care pathways we follow which tell us what is an expected outcome at a certain time..but we really don’t know. I can say from personal experience, those in this “PVS” DO appear to hear voices and react to touch and other sensory stimulation.

Scientists don’t even agree on whether the woman had some real awareness – she seemed to follow, mentally, certain commands – or if her brain was responding more automatically to speech.

Bulloney. Just bulloney. Scientists don’t work with these patients every day. I do. The so called automatic reponses to speech and touch and smell and movement are not involuntary, that’s for sure. These patients FEEL pain, they FEEL discomfort and they FEEL relief and comfort.

“This is just one patient. The result in one patient does not tell us whether any other patient will show similar results, nor whether this result will have any bearing on her,” cautioned neuroscientist Adrian Owen of Britain’s Medical Research Council. He led the novel brain-scanning experiment, reported in the journal Science.

The work does raise calls for more research in this difficult-to-study population – because of the tantalizing prospect of one day learning how to predict whose brain is more likely to recover, and maybe even tailoring rehabilitation.

“It raises the questions of ethics and experience of these patients, I think, to a new level,” said neuroscientist Joy Hirsch of New York’s Columbia University Medical Center. “It raises the tension about how we treat these patients.”

There are more ramifications to these studies too: The very fact that a brain fires off ANYTHING proves there is LIFE inside. One will not be able to use the term “Brain Dead” anymore…Just watch- the politically minded Culture of Death (TM) people will have a say in all this.

Doctors use MRI machines and other scanners to examine structural brain injuries. To see how the brain actually fires – what areas are activated during different processes – requires more advanced imaging called functional MRI, or fMRI.

Owen and colleagues contend their fMRI experiment showed the car-crash victim had some preserved conscious awareness despite her vegetative state.

How could they tell? First, they checked that she could process speech. Upon being told “there was milk and sugar in the coffee,” the fMRI showed brain regions reacting the same in the woman and in healthy volunteers.

Then came the big test. Owen told the woman to perform a mental task – to imagine herself playing tennis and walking through her house. Motor-control regions of her brain lit up like they did in the healthy people he compared with her.

“There is no other explanation for this than that she has intentionally decided to involve herself in the study and do what we asked when we asked,” Owen said in an interview.

I say- this happens even in those who are in a deep coma. I have seen reaction- to minute stimuli as well as intense pain or pleasurable experiences. Human beings are remarkable in their innate desire to be alive, no matter what condition their body is in. Or their brain. The experience of living is a human need- as strange as this sounds. Everyone wants to live…even those who some think DON’T want to live.

Other scientists say that’s not clear-cut.

The results are “not totally convincing of consciousness,” neuroscientist Lionel Naccache of INSERM, France’s national science institute, wrote in a review in Science. He cautioned that the woman’s injuries weren’t as massive as those of most vegetative-state patients.

Columbia’s Hirsch said the woman is not conscious. But, “it tells me that this patient’s brain is operating the essential elements for consciousness. The machinery is there and operating,” she said.

Always a few nay-sayers. I like the terms they use here too- machinery, operating– I think this speaks a lot to how these scientists THINK when it comes to this stuff. We’re not humans. We’re machines. To be tinkered with and tested. We’re not alive either, we have no feelings or “consciousness”.

This is a great thing and I hope they find out- scientifically- much more of what some of us already know.