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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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WHAT MUST TERRI SCHIAVO’S PARENTS FEEL, AS THEY READ THIS…...

We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state - doctors can only make a sufferer’s last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking ... a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. Steve Boggan witnesses these ‘strange and wonderful’ rebirths

Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as “a cabbage”, greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.

Was it Newton who said that he was like a child fiddling with shiny pebbles on the shores of a limitless sea of knowledge….? When I hear mere human beings “bragging” about the state of our knowledge, I always think of a couple of kids on the front lawn, bragging to each other “I can jump closer to the moon that you can!”

The story you’re about to read reminds me of that—of the limits of our knowledge, of the foolishness of rejecting what God has said because “we know better”, of the deep wisdom of modesty as we deal with the mystery known as “human life”.

After Louis’ (the first patient who got the medicine) awakening was publicised in the South African media, Dr Ralf Clauss, a physician of nuclear medicine - the use of radioactive isotopes in diagnostic scans - at the Medical University of Southern Africa, contacted Nel to suggest carrying out a scan on Louis. “The results were so unbelievable that I got other colleagues to check my findings,” says Clauss, who now works at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford. “We did scans before and after we gave Louis zolpidem. Areas that appeared black and dead beforehand began to light up with activity afterwards. I was dumbfounded - and I still am.”

Clauss says immediate improvements in the left parietal lobe and the left lentiform nucleus were visible. In lay terms, these are important for motor function, sight, speech and hearing.

“I remember saying to Dr Nel that we were witnessing medical history,” says Clauss.

No one yet knows exactly how a sleeping pill could wake up the seemingly dead brain cells….

Set aside your hubris, and READ THE WHOLE THING

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