By MICHAEL SHERMER - TRUE/SLANT
Added: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 UTC

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You heard it here first, folks. On November 25, 2009 in this forum I explained how Rom Houben, the Belgian man who allegedly “woke up” from a 23-year long coma, was “communicating” his “statements” via the long-ago discredited method called facilitated communication, whereby a facilitator holds the hand of a subject (autistic child, comatose man) and guides it over a keyboard to type out letters. (See the original footage of the coma man communicating here).

“I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me,” Houben allegedly typed. “It was my second birth. I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead. Just imagine. You hear, see, feel and think, but no one can see that.”

This is what is called the “ideomotor” effect, where the brain subtly and subconsciously guides the hands and fingers over a keyboard, or a Ouija board, or directs the movements of dowsing rods in search of underground water. It has been demonstrated time and again that it is always the facilitator doing the communicating and not the subject.

At last Rouben’s attending physician, Dr. Steven Laureys, has admitted that Rouben cannot communicate: “We did not have all the facts before. To me, it’s enough to say that this method doesn’t work.”

No, sorry Dr. Laureys, you were told this the very day it was announced, by many people from all over the world who remembered this discredited technique from the 1990s after it ran roughshod over the emotions of the parents of autistic children who thought that at long last their charges could speak to them, offering messages of love and hope and redemption and…molestation.
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TAGGED: IRRATIONALITY, MEDICINE, PSYCHOLOGY