Ambien Wakes Up Patients in Persistent Vegetative State

[billroper]

Via Patterico, an article from the Guardian about how the sleeping pill, Ambien, seems to wake some severely brain damaged patients up from their permanent vegetative state.

Comments

[billroper]

I suspect that there will be some people who are so profoundly brain-damaged that nothing will help them. But for people who still have the circuitry available to "rewire" around the damage, this looks like it could be a really good thing.

I sent a note about this to a friend of mine with ataxia on the chance that the type of brain damage that he's got could be positively affected by this. We'll see what happens.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

To actually be able to bring people back from persistent vegetative state would be a great medical advance, but I hope that it comes with improvements in diagnosis, because I'm sure there will be some that it can't help, and I don't want some people's simpleminded approach to ethics to require that we maintain the empty bodies. If it's me, I want real science to decide if I can be helped, and if not, I don't want my body hanging around in a parody of life.