God in the Medicine
'Miracle' firefighter received experimental drug treatment
Day after day, Donald Herbert sat unmoving in a wheelchair, drooling and barely aware. For the once robust firefighter, 10 minutes without oxygen had turned into nearly 10 years without seeing or speaking.His wife refused to give up. His doctor had an idea.
Certain medications had shown promise in Dr. Jamil Ahmed's more recently brain-damaged patients, drugs normally used to treat Parkinson's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression. He gave them to Herbert.
Three months later, on Saturday, something clicked in Herbert's brain.
It's a miracle! Oh, wait...it's a pharmaceutical.
To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from God.
