From the Daily Mail:

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.

Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them – but could make no sound.

‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,’ said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent veg[e]tative state.

If there’s one thing I learned from the Terri Schiavo case, it’s that when doctors say you are in a persistent vegetative state, you are. No arguing, Mr. Houben. You’re supposed to be dead.

Doctors are never wrong. Except when they are . . . and then they’re shocked, stunned, and amazed.

The other day I told you about those doctors who are shocked, stunned, and amazed every time a “vegetative” patient turns out not to be — and are similarly gobsmacked whenever the physiology of the brain reveals a new and previously unknown wonder.

Now See Dubya brings word of another such story: Ambien waking up “vegetative” patients:

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The Washington Post today reports on an unprecedented experiment to detect awareness in patients previously classified as vegetative:

According to all the tests, the young woman was deep in a “vegetative state” — completely unresponsive and unaware of her surroundings. But then a team of scientists decided to do an unprecedented experiment, employing sophisticated technology to try to peer behind the veil of her brain injury for any signs of conscious awareness.

Doctors were shocked by what they found:

Without any hint that she might have a sense of what was happening, the researchers put the woman in a scanner that detects brain activity and told her that in a few minutes they would say the word “tennis,” signaling her to imagine she was serving, volleying and chasing down balls. When they did, the neurologists were shocked to see her brain “light up” exactly as an uninjured person’s would. It happened again and again. And the doctors got the same result when they repeatedly cued her to picture herself wandering, room to room, through her own home.

Doctors were also stunned:

“I was absolutely stunned,” said Adrian M. Owen, a British neurologist who led the team reporting the case in today’s issue of the journal Science. “We had no idea whether she would understand our instructions. But this showed that she is aware.”

and they were shocked again:

“This is a very important study,” said Nicholas D. Schiff, a neurologist at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. “It’s the first time we’ve ever seen something like this. It really is kind of shocking.”

The article cautions that people should not take these findings and leap to the conclusion that they are applicable to the Terri Schiavo situation:

But Owen, Schiff and others stressed that the research does not indicate that many patients in vegetative states are necessarily aware or likely to recover. Schiavo, in particular, had suffered much more massive brain damage for far longer than the patient in Britain, making awareness or recovery impossible, they said.

“I’m quite confident that [Schiavo] would not have responded in this way,” said James L. Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School. But, he said, the findings indicate that current methods of evaluating awareness are unreliable. He added: “Still, if Schiavo had reacted this way, I would be shocked and stunned.”

OK, I made up that last line. But my point is very real: the experts are often wrong. This is a point I have made before (for example, see UPDATE x3 to this post). But it keeps getting made again — all the time.

Recall the case of Terry Wallis, the man who was in a minimally conscious state for 19 years, and whose brain then “spontaneously rewired itself.” The doctors were wrong about him too:

Wallis was frequently classified as being in a permanent vegetative state. Though his family fought for a re-evaluation after seeing many promising signs that he was trying to communicate, their requests were turned down.

When doctors turned out to be wrong about Wallis, they were amazed:

Krish Sathian, a neurologist and specialist in brain rehabilitation at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, US, describes it as an amazing finding. “The bounds on the possible extent of neural plasticity just keep on shifting,” he says. “Classical teaching would not have predicted any of these changes.”

Why, doctors would have bet money it never would have happened this way:

“Most neurologists would have been willing to bet money that whatever the cause of it, if it hadn’t changed in 19 years, wasn’t going to change now,” [Dr. James] Bernat said. “So it’s really extraordinary.”

An amusing side note: the research in the Wallis case was led by Dr. Nicholas Schiff — the same guy who was shocked by the revelations in today’s Washington Post article. He termed Wallis’s case “miraculous” — but apparently thought that the era of brain-related miracles ended with Wallis.

So evidently, these doctors can be shocked and stunned by the power of the human brain . . . and then quickly retreat back into their natural state of all-knowing complacency — only to be shocked and stunned again when the next extraordinary case comes along.

Maybe this will help explain why some of us weren’t so quick to write off Terri Schiavo’s life just because some “experts” assured us that she was in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery. I’ll concede that, with the autopsy, the experts were almost certainly right — and they usually are.

Except when they’re not — at which point they become shocked, stunned, and amazed.

Michael Schiavo is blogging at Kos. (H/t Malkin.) Or, more likely, his ghost-writer is ghost-blogging there.

Go say hi.

Recently I posted that Michael Schiavo had used Terri Schiavo’s gravestone to take a parting shot at her parents — one of the most shameless acts of petty, self-absorbed nastiness in recent memory. (See here for more details.)

Michael Schiavo defenders have made different arguments. Some have questioned whether he really meant to insult the Schindlers. Others have admitted that, of course, he did — but have argued that, while that’s regrettable, it’s perhaps understandable given all the supposed slanders the guy has had to endure.

And then there’s a third opinion, which as far as I can tell, is held by one guy on the Web, and one guy alone. This fellow actually argues that it’s appropriate for Michael Schiavo to use his ex-wife’s tombstone to exact revenge upon his in-laws:

The Schindlers have misbehaved and they need to be punished.

Words cannot describe my contempt for someone who actively approves of using someone else’s gravestone to psychologically punish that person’s parents. But some words come pretty close, and they have been spoken by other respected bloggers, whom I’ll allow to speak for me:

Dean Esmay, Dean Esmay again, and Bill from INDC Journal (see bottom of comment thread).

UPDATE: In case anyone is wondering why I might experience schadenfreude in seeing this guy’s true character gradually revealed to bloggers whom I respect, read this post.

I don’t really see any point in leaving comments open on this.

UPDATE x2: I’ve removed the quotes from these bloggers from the post. You can go read them yourself if you want to.

There is no evidence that Michael Schiavo is a murderer. There is ample evidence that he is scum. Apparently having failed in his efforts to hide his wife’s remains from her parents, he has done the next best thing. Despite the existence of a court order that he inform the Schindlers of any memorial service, he held the memorial service without informing them, and decorated her gravestone with an inscription specifically designed to serve as a figurative thumb in the Schindlers’ eye, every time they come to visit their daughter:

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