Doctor: Paralyzed man can’t communicate after all

February 21, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

LONDON (AP) — It was heralded as a medical miracle. After spending more than two decades in a vegetative state, Rom Houben, a Belgian man in his mid-40s, was suddenly able to communicate, news reports trumpeted last November.

Other experts questioned the method that Houben apparently was using to communicate. The technique is known as “facilitated communication,” in which the patient supposedly directs the hand of a speech therapist who typed out his thoughts.

Houben’s doctors said it seemed to be genuine. Until now.

Dr. Steven Laureys, a neurologist at Liege University Hospital in Belgium, one of Houben’s doctors, now acknowledges the technique doesn’t work and that although Houben is conscious, he is not communicating.

“We did not have all the facts before,” he said Friday. “The story of Rom is about the diagnosis of consciousness, not communication.”

Houben was injured in a car crash in 1983 when he was 20 and was said to be in a vegetative state, in which a patient is unconscious and there is no evidence of perception or intentional movement.

Based on bedside tests four years ago, Laureys and his team diagnosed Houben as being conscious and performed brain scans proving his brain activity was more active than other doctors had thought.

Laureys, who was not Houben’s treating physician, said the man’s family and other doctors brought in a speech therapist to use facilitated communication.