Don't just read the headlines

I'm normally a fan of the BBC, particularly the News website. However, even they let through some sloppy journalism sometimes. There was health story earlier this week about a man in a coma who apparently experienced a miraculous recovery due to some unusual treatment. My radar is well tuned to quackery and poor science, so I took a look.

Magnetic field 'aids coma victim'

Generally, any treatment or intervention that seems to be too good to be true, is just that. Maybe this treatment works, maybe it doesn't. However, this appears to be an unconventional treatment applied to just one person. This is not how a scientific trial of a treatment should work. Reporting on a single case like this is bad enough. What made it worse was that the BBC pulled out a quote from another scientist, Dr John Whyte of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Philadelphia and stuck that prominently on the article:

I believe that electromagnetic treatments such as deep brain stimulation, direct current transcranial stimulation, and TMS may all have therapeutic promise

This seems to be an endorsement of the treatment. However, when you read the full article, this quote is topped and tailed by the following quotes:

even eight months after a brain injury, spontaneous improvement of this type was "not uncommon".

and

single cases provide very weak evidence except when treatment occurs very late (so spontaneous recovery should be minimal) and the patient is studied for a considerable interval both before and after the treatment.

This is quite a different view and is the reasonable response I would expect from a scientist. Maybe I'm being harsh on the person who wrote the article as they probably wouldn't be responsible for the headline and the quote extraction.