Delaware Liberal

Weekend Open Thread

Happy weekend everyone! I hope you’re enjoying your relatively snow-free weekend. Are you ready for an open thread? Let’s roll!

Tiger Woods has started his apology tour. One blogger put together a handy flowchart to determine if that apology is intended for you.

My answer was “no.”

Remember the miraculous story of the man who had been misdiagnosed in a vegetative state but thanks to science can now communicate? Not so much:

It seemed to be a medical miracle: the car crash victim assumed for 23 years to be in a coma who was suddenly found to be conscious and able to communicate by tapping on a computer.

The sceptics said it was impossible – and it was. The story of Rom Houben of Belgium, which made headlines worldwide last November when he was shown to be “talking”, was today revealed to have been nothing of the sort.

Laureys, leader of the coma science group and department of neurology at Liege University hospital, said a study he had done of three speech therapists working with minimally-conscious patients showed that in two cases, including Houben’s, facilitated communication failed. “From the start, I did not prescribe this technique. But it is important not to make judgments. His family and care givers acted out of love and compassion,” he said.

The turnaround vindicates those doctors who had doubted Houben’s apparent ability. “It’s like using an Ouija board,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bio ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “It was too good to be true, and we shouldn’t have believed it.”

Do you think this retraction will be as widely reported as the supposed breakthrough? I doubt it.

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