Talk:Coma

Attention & Clean up tags

I have tagged the article with the above. Briefly, it suffers from the following problems:

• Structure and organization: Coma is a medical subject. These are best written in a particular format. See WikiProject Clinical Medicine for an excellent guide.
• Content weaknesses: Aside from organization, the content itself is weak. The subsections include only brief statements about some aspects of coma. Selection of topics to comment on appears haphazard. Erroneous statements and claims. No figures.
• Copied work: Parts of the article have been lifted off the NIH website. After the lead section, there's an "In layman's[sic] terms" subsection consisting entirely of a quoted paragraph with no attribution.
• References/bibliography: Non-existant.

The article needs the attention of docs. I've tagged it in hopes someone who can contribute will have a go at it. Am currently occupied with other articles, but will touch base here within a few weeks. Thanks.—Encephalon | ζ | Σ 03:24:25, 2005-08-09 (UTC)

I'm working on cleaning this page up. I'm taking out redundant material like the history of Karen Ann Quinlan and GCS, both of which are repeated on their respective pages. There's a lot more cleaning up that needs done. I'd like to take out this randomness:

"In Germany, Köln (music therapy) is used to quicken the awakening traject.In Belgium, a project is set up to train dogs' and cats's "sixth sense" to warn patients and medical staff that a coma patient has awakened." Anyone mind? Another question: can aspirin really lead to coma? I've never heard of that. Maybe if it gives you a stroke...--Delldot 02:22, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

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I've noted several organizational problems with the article, which I will be addressing in the coming days. For now, I've made note of some ways to edit the article, and have fixed some minor grammatical and mechanical errors.
Kether83 05:45, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Distinctive Phases in Coma

i added this section because this is important information that was missing from the article, but if people think it should be integrated into the previous section (Contrasts to Other Conditions), be my guest. i think both categories stand alone, although perhaps both are possibly sub-categories of a larger grouping about coma within the continuum of consciousness. -- Denstat 18:24, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Longest Coma

How long is the longest coma after which the person awoke?

--1000Faces 05:58, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I wonder that too. Here's an interesting recent article about a man who spent 19 years in a coma and woke up to find that his country was no longer communist. Esn 06:14, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Problem with "Derivation" section?

It states "Saguto stayed in this coma for seven months, two weeks, four days, six hours, nine minutes, and 27.66924 seconds". This was supposedly in 1939 - there is no way they would have been able to measure the number of seconds that accurately. I smell someone trying to be funny. 38.119.112.189 17:59, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Physical aging

A question that came to my mind while reading the article was whether the body continues to physically age during the coma—for instance, in the case of Elaine Esposito. I would imagine the answer is yes, but I'm not familiar with comas. ::Travis Evans 11:20, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Few questions...

What does the person in the coma actually go through when they are in it? Is it like your in a random dream, and the body actually puts itself into a coma when it sees the damage (usually to brain or nervous system) is severe enough.