Once Again, The Scientific (and Medical) Community is Proved Wrong

From today's NY Times:

Thousands of brain-damaged people who are treated as if they are almost completely unaware may in fact hear and register what is going on around them but be unable to respond, a new brain-imaging study suggests.

No kidding. But the close to this article is alarming:

"The most consequential thing about this is that we have opened a door, we have found an objective voice for these patients, which tells us they have some cognitive ability in a way they cannot tell us themselves," Dr. Hirsch said. The patients are, she added, "more human than we imagined in the past, and it is unconscionable not to aggressively pursue research efforts to evaluate them and develop therapeutic techniques."

Dr. Joy Hirsch is the Director of the Functional MRI Research Center at Columbia University Medical Center and the study's senior author. She also, until recently, believed brain-damaged patients were "less human" than "normal" humans.

My God, this woman's supposed to be a physician. Clearly not in the vein of the Great Physician, that's for sure.