September 13, 2006
Recovering
- For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, "Hello." Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.
Three hundred miles away, 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.
Across the Atlantic in the United States, George Melendez, who is also brain-damaged, has lain twitching and moaning as if in agony for years, causing his parents unbearable grief. He, too, is given this little tablet and again, it's as if a light comes on. His father asks him if he is, indeed, in pain. "No," George smiles, and his family burst into tears.
Amazing. Read it all. Pharmaceuticals Posted by AlexC at September 13, 2006 12:01 PM
Interesting. I say we halt all sales of this product until the FDA can do an exhaustive 20 year study, allowing thousands to die on placebos. It's really the only safe way to proceed.
While these are always interesting, there is always a "cold fusion" element to these. Like reading Drudge, you read a hundred of them and occasionally one comes true.
Posted by: jk at September 13, 2006 2:31 PMUnlike "cold fusion" however, something like this is actually more likely than unlikely to one day come to pass. Keep on truckin' private pharmaceutical researchers.
Posted by: johngalt at September 13, 2006 5:26 PMNobody holds "big pharma" in higher esteem than me, but I get a few emails a month with somebody who's curing MS in Landgmapalaaka with Diet Coke and Tiddlywinks. One's grain of salt quotient gets pretty high.
Though if The Guardian must be right about something, this would be my choice...
Posted by: jk at September 13, 2006 6:43 PM | What do you think? [3]