Posted on 11/28/2009 1:41:27 PM PST by neverdem
One was a middle-aged man who refused to get into the shower. The other was a teenager who was afraid to get out.
The man, Leonard, a writer living outside Chicago, found himself completely unable to wash himself or brush his teeth. The teenager, Ross, growing up in a suburb of New York, had become so terrified of germs that he would regularly shower for seven hours. Each received a diagnosis of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, or O.C.D., and for years neither felt comfortable enough to leave the house.
But leave they eventually did, traveling in desperation to a hospital in Rhode Island for an experimental brain operation in which four raisin-sized holes were burned deep in their brains.
Today, two years after surgery, Ross is 21 and in college. “It saved my life,” he said. “I really believe that.”
The same cannot be said for Leonard, 67, who had surgery in 1995. “There was no change at all,” he said. “I still don’t leave the house.”
Both men asked that their last names not be used to protect their privacy.
The great promise of neuroscience at the end of the last century was that it would revolutionize the treatment of psychiatric problems. But the first real application of advanced brain science is not novel at all. It is a precise, sophisticated version of an old and controversial approach: psychosurgery, in which doctors operate directly on the brain.
In the last decade or so, more than 500 people have undergone brain surgery for problems like depression, anxiety, Tourette’s syndrome, even...
--snip--
“We have this idea — it’s almost a fetish — that progress is its own justification, that if something is promising, then how can we not rush to relieve suffering?” said Paul Root Wolpe, a medical ethicist at Emory University...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That reminds me of the rats. If there's a problem, then the government can find a solution, never giving a rat's @ss about unintended consequences. How about, "First, do no harm"?
What harm, in this case?
I really don't like the idea of surgery as a solution to a psychological state.
How does one ethically test such surgeries before deployment in people.
To be fair, in some cases involving clearly bizarre nervous system activity, doctors have been able to pinpoint a hypothetical trouble spot in the brain by means of slight electrical stimulation at various places until the bizarre activity reappeared. With the trouble spot identified, brain material could be removed at that precise location, usually without producing lasting harm and often alleviating the problem. This is not their grandfathers’ loop of wire (or worse, screwdriver) lobotomies.
There was an international moratorium on psychosurgery tat came out of a conferencein Spain in the ‘60s. For more info on why re-visit “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Commuting a death sentence to life with no parole in return for medical experimentation works for me...
The outlawed lobotomy. What is is when they push a hot poker into your brain?
I’ll bet everyone involved except the patient believes in hope, change and socialism.
Single-celled life does a lot with very little - Bacterial biochemistry mapped in detail.
By Happy Accident, Chemists Produce a New Blue
Experts Say Swine Flu Mutations Do Not Warrant New Alarm
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
OMW! I love your tagline.
Credit where due, it’s a quote from F.R. member “Finny”.
Thank you, GB! :^)
No, they didn't. It is still legal to do lobotomies in the United States. It isn't done often, and the techniques have changed, but it is still done. Russia did outlaw lobotomies back there somewhere, iirc.
Lobotomy's Back: In 1949 lobotomy was hailed as a medical miracle. But images of zombielike patients and surgeons with ice picks soon put an end to the practice. Now, however, the practitioners have refined their tools. Discover Magazine, October, 1997 (^).
After Frances Farmer was subjected to the famous hot probe up the nose into the frontal lobe.
WASN’T THIS KIND OF CRAP OUTLAWED.
You have to keep a close eye on shrinks, they keep coming up with new USES OF THE OLD ways to destroy peoples lives.
THIS pAUL rOOT gUY IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THAT ATTITUTDE.
After Frances Farmer was subjected to the famous hot probe up the nose into the frontal lobe.
WASN’T THIS KIND OF CRAP OUTLAWED.
You have to keep a close eye on shrinks, they keep coming up with new USES OF THE OLD ways to destroy peoples lives.
THIS PAUL ROOT GUY IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THAT ATTITUDE.
The brain is the most complex object in the known universe. To me, it’s a wonder that they know anything about it at all, little as it is. I have no moral objection to these procedures. The real cure will be a combination of therapies, including surgery.
Sicker than the people they treat.
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