Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

No, Tim Brennan; these two reactions are NOT the same or close to being the same.

You see JFK reacting immediately after his trauma, while the other man went into a coma lasting for hours after his trauma, and there is no evidence or reports that his arms popped up immediately like JFK's did.

You see JFK reacting not just by abducting his arms and flexing his forearms but by internally rotating his forearms, while the other man has his forearms rotated outward- away from his center. It's the exact opposite. 

You also see JFK hunching his shoulders and clenching his hand, which the other man is not doing. The difference between them in general tension could not be more stark.

What JFK is doing is reacting to being shot in the throat from the front. It is only natural to bring your hands to an area that is in trouble. He has to raise his arms to get his hands there. Why does he have his elbows out? Look at it again and see if you can figure it out.  

    
Have you figured it out yet? I'll give you a hint: it has to do with his breathing. 

You see, by raising his arms that way, with his elbows out, it has the effect of expanding his chest, which helps with breathing. Really, chest expansion is what breathing is all about. You realize that atmospheric air is under pressure. What forces it into the lungs is the expansion of the chest where the natural vacuum results in the air moving in. It is the natural tendency of gases to move from an area of high pressure to low. The muscular action of expanding the chest plays into that; it exploits it.  The placement of his elbows is helping JFK to expand his chest. 

Also note that JFK has got one hand over his mouth. Look at it closely.

Now, you can't tell me that that is a reflex, his covering his mouth with his open hand. Thorburn's patient was not doing that or anything close to it. Meanwhile, JFK's left hand is doing something very different; he has it clenched, and he may be pulling his tie with it, as Gil Jesus suggests. The idea that all that complex activity is due to reflex muscle spasm is preposterous. It's absurd.  

If this was a cord-generated reflex, it would divide when it reached the spinal nerves, and then wouldn't it be symmetrical? Why aren't his right and left hands doing the same thing?  

On Thorburn's patient, all we are seeing is the inevitable shortening that comes from unopposed muscle tone. There is a constant tendency for muscles to shorten which is opposed by opposing muscles which are stretching them. Call it counterbalance. It's like two kids on a see-saw who are balancing each other. But in this case, his opposing muscles were paralyzed, so there was only the one effect. It's like one of the kids on the see-saw suddenly became weightless. What happens to the other kid? But, his arms didn't suddenly pop into spasm. You can easily see that it wasn't that. There is no spasming going on. His arms just gradually settled into the position we see. 

You better look at this image again, Brennan. That is JFK reacting to being shot in the throat and feeling that his breathing was in jeopardy. 

The idea that all that diverse muscular action is due to involuntary spasms is insane. Are we supposed to believe that just by accident or coincidence, his hands happened to go to the area that was in trouble? When in the history of Medicine has that much muscular activity been attributed to involuntary movements except in epileptic seizures? This looks organized, but in epilepsy, the muscular activity looks completely unorganized. It never looks as organized as what we are seeing here. This is not a Thorburn reaction. This is a man who is reacting to being shot in the throat whose ability to breathe was imperiled. That's what we are seeing. 

Experiment: try raising your hands to where his are WITHOUT flaring your elbows out. It does nothing to help your breathing. Now try it with your elbows out. Feel the difference?