Y’know, and meanwhile all these centuries the Vatican had been bonking dying Popes with a hammer…
Regarding the tongue-in-cheek “body doubles” and “crash test dummies” talk, can people actually be in a long term coma without the use of hospital equipment to keep them alive? It always seemed to me like being in a coma required living in a hospital, or at home with a bunch of hospital equipment and a long term care nurse.
Can someone be in a coma for a length of time while untethered to unwieldy medical equipment? Can you just throw them in a car and drive them around? Can you take them home and put them in bed, or set them on the couch and watch TV next to them?
Surely they would starve, dehydrate, or die of whatever you die of when your elimination isn’t working?
Fair enough. What about short lengths of time away from the feeding tube/IV? Could you throw comatose Grandpa in a wheelchair and take him to a restaurant to be present at a dinner with his family, if you later brought him back and hooked him back up to an IV and feeding tube? Or do comatose patients always require a respirator for breathing?
Also, I know most comas are caused by head trauma, but I assume that after a while in a coma, that trauma gets healed and doesn’t require continuous care, right? So it’s not like taking them from the hospital will cause their injury to get worse? Maybe the term I’m looking for is “stable”? Are coma patients stable in the sense that, as long as they get food and water, they aren’t in immediate danger of dying?
I guess it would depend on the nature of the trauma that caused the coma, since damaged brains/ spinal cords don’t regenerate even though other injuries would heal over time. If the part of the brain that controls respiration was damaged, the patient would never be able to breathe without a respirator.
Tangent to the OP:
While setting a coma patient on fire is obviously beyond the pale … are there cases where a coma patient wakes up in response to a much more prosaic discomfort/pain stimulus? For example, waking in response to having an IV put in, having blood drawn, having breathing tubes inserted/replaced, etc.
Can a doctor tell that “Yep – it was absolutely that specific needle stick at 10:22 a.m. that awoke the patient.” Or would 10:22 a.m. instead simply be considered around the time the patient was going to wake up on his own, anyhow – needle stick or not?
It depends on the coma patient, and what sort of damage they took that put them in the coma in the first place. In some cases, the brain damage is extensive enough that they need machines to keep their internal organs functioning. In other cases, they can breath and keep their heartbeating on their own, they just can’t wake up.
In either case, it’s not unusual for the patient to be released to hospice care or allowed to die at home, if there’s no hope of recovery. There are other issues of long-term care for people who can’t move, though, that might be better handled by a hospital staff. Bedsores are a big problem, for example, even for people who aren’t in a coma, but can’t move. It takes dedicated care to make sure that bedsores don’t form, which can be hard to do if you’re trying to take care of someone on your own.
Read the definition of "coma":
IOW, if the patient is aroused to awareness by pain (or any other stimulus), it isn’t coma.
If the blood draw at 10:22 seems to awaken the patient, (A) fire your phlebotomist, and (B) the patient came out of the coma spontaneously at some time before 10:22.
There are lots of creative ways for inflicting pain that do trivial if any damage.
Sticking a long cottage swab up their nose
A pinch with a pair of hemostats on a nostril, earlobe, nipple
Rubbing firmly pretty much anywhere skin and bone are close like sternum, temples, etc.
According to The Sopranos S6E3, a coma victim can hear and understand kvetching enough to raise heartbeat and blood pressure and bring him out of it. 
I wasn’t looking for suggestions! :eek:
I’ve been rubbing near and on my sternum and temples pretty hard, by my estimation, but I can’t see how it hurts.
What am I doing wrong?
Obviously there are many many ways (some suggested above) to easily inflict sharp but short-acting pain. But I don’t get this one.
Have someone else do it, with their knuckles.
Well i was giving kindler gentler ways than lighting them on fire…
Pressure on the nail bed? Ah yes, the old needles under the fingernails level-of-consiousness test…
It’s hard to do even if you have several people caring for a patient, as I discovered when helping to care for dying relatives.
Make a half-fist, and plant your first IP joints firmly over the sternum. Now press down and scrub your hand up and down along the sternum, pushing down and dragging the skin along with you, as far as it will stretch (maybe 1.5 - 2 inches) about 4 times a second. You aren’t ‘rubbing’ the skin so much as grinding it between your knuckles and the patient’s sternum. It hurts, and if the guy in the trauma bay doesn’t open his eyes or try to push your hand away, he’s got serious troubs.
Neurosurgeons IMO are the most ruthless when doing this.
I hadn’t realized the definition of “coma” was essentially tautological. Ignorance fought 
It’s not a tautological definition, but the OP was asking a tautological question.
It’s kind of like asking if you can cure someone of needing crutches by taking away their crutches. If that works, they didn’t need crutches.
/groan/