Waking up the vegetables

As a doctor who has worked with brain damaged people, I always ridicule the term "Persistant vegetative state" since it is overdiagnosed 40% of the time according to the British Medical Journal, and I've had too many people diagnosed with it who were alert and could recognize and communicate, but were misdiagnosed by neurologists at a one hour examination...

So now the UKGuardian has a report on the sleeping pill Ambien waking them up.
Across three continents, brain-damaged patients are reporting remarkable improvements after taking a pill that should make them fall asleep but that, instead, appears to be waking up cells in their brains that were thought to have been dead. In the next two months, trials on patients are expected to begin in South Africa aimed at finding out exactly what is going on inside their heads. Because, at the moment, the results are baffling doctors.

Ironically, many people with Dementia get agitated with benzodiazepams, so that may be why a drug that's been around awhile hasn't been widely used for brain damaged people....but it does make sense...after all, stimulants like Amphetamines calm people with ADD related hyperactivity by stimulating the "self control" parts of the brain. In contrast, sedating medicines like valium and sleeping pills, even cold pills, make young kids and grandmoms hyper because they calm down parts of the brain, allowing the active parts to take over...

Developing...
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