It seems like I have been "bashing" on science of late, which is untrue because I find science to be a fascinating subject.  When the scientific process is applied correctly it can help us understand so much about ourselves and our world.  So today I thought I would talk about a scientific study that is really going to help medicine in it's treatment of people who are trapped in a persistent vegetative state.  Researchers in the UK have determined that PVS patients are aware of their surroundings and can think and (in certain cases) communicate with others.

Experts using brain scans have discovered for the first time that the victims, who show no outward signs of awareness, can not only comprehend what people are saying to them but also answer simple questions.

They were able to give yes or no responses to simple biographical questions

The unlocking of this “inner voice” has astounded doctors and has dramatic implications for thousands of life and death decisions over patients trapped in what is known as a persistent vegetative state (PVS).

It means around one in five PVS patients may be able to communicate.

Emphasis mine.  Now this is going to raise more questions than it answers because unless the doctors use a very sophisticated MRI machine, there isn't (yet) a way to know if the patients can communicate or not...

The British and Belgian researchers made their discovery, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, after studying a 29-year-old man brain damaged in a car crash in 2003.

The man was in a coma for two years before slipping into a persistent vegetative state. He was seemingly awake, occasionally blinked, but showed no other sign of being aware of the outside world.

But the team, led by Dr Owen, whose work was funded by the Medical Research Council, and Steven Laureys of the University of Liege, discovered it was possible to talk to him by tapping into his brain activity.

They used a hi-tech functional magnetic resonance scanner (fMRI) to measure brain response while the patient was asked questions.

The scan uses magnetic fields and radio waves to detect electrical pulses.

Of course with this information comes even more uncertainty and implications.

Dr Adrian Owen, co-author at the Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge who carried out the latest research on one patient, said the findings have enormous philosophical and ethical implications.

He said: “We were astonished when we saw the results of the patient’s scan and that he was able to correctly answer the questions that were asked by simply changing his thoughts.

“Not only did these scans tell us that the patient was not in a vegetative state but, more importantly, for the first time in five years it provided the patient with a way of communicating his thoughts to the outside world.

“We can be pretty confident that he is entirely conscious. He has to understand the instructions, comprehend speech, and then make a decision.”

These ethical implications are EXACTLY what many were talking about during the Teri Schiavo debate.  There is (as we found out with this story) so much about the human brain specifically that we just do not know about!

Now there is no way to say that this kind of information would have helped in Ms. Schiavo’s case – she was (according to all reports) in an extreme PVS.  But it does show what many of us said back then, that there is so much more about the brain (and human anatomy as a whole) that we just do not know.  It is not a something that we can replicate in a laboratory or greater studies.  However, it is one more peek into a complex organism that we still have so much more to learn about.