China's Controversial Brain Surgery To Cure Drug Addiction

kkleiner writes "A small handful of doctors in China are using a highly controversial procedure to rid people of drug addiction by destroying a part of patients' brains. The procedure involves drilling small holes into the skulls of patients and inserting long electrodes that destroy a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. This area, often referred to as the "pleasure center" of the brain, is the major nucleus of the brain's reward circuit. Is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are?" The practice has been officially banned, but apparently continues nonetheless.

Comments

21st Century Lobotomies

[Anonymous Coward]

They worked out so well last time.

Seriously editors

[thegarbz]

FIX THIS SHIT!

There's no more nice way to say it. This isn't a case of leaving the unit off a measurement, a simple typo, or even the ever so common case of a grammatical mistake a 10 year old could pick out.

This is YOU timothy not bothering to read 111 words that you put in the summary, let alone edit them.

Know what happens to me when I go to work and don't do any work, worse still I embarrass the company I work for? I get fired.

Thanks, Minitrue!

[Goaway]

The practice has been officially banned, but apparently continues nonetheless.

Of course, we're not going to let that stop us from calling it "China's", as if it were some kind of official and mandatory procedure.

Re:I'll auto-Godwin myself

[GameboyRMH]

Yep the rest of the world only stopped with the eugenics, forced sterilizations and routine lobotomies because Hitler made them uncool.

Re:Lost a Friend Yesterday

[GameboyRMH]

if you were circumcised and can't feel pleasure from your penis then something went horribly, horribly wrong with the procedure. That's definitely not normal. I'm circumcised so I know what I'm talking about.

Re:Lost a Friend Yesterday

[LordLimecat]

Losing a friend because he made bad decisions is tragic, and cause for grief. Having a friend lobotomized because the government has decided youre making bad decisions is horrifying, and cause for outrage.

There is a big difference between making bad decisions freely, and having the government decide that you are no longer fit to make your own decisions.

Re:Lost a Friend Yesterday

[AdamHaun]

Mostly I was talking about the ACs, but let's talk about you. What BoRegardless said was:

Now [my drug-addicted friend] is gone. Would he have been better served to still be here w/o some "reward center". I don't know. I will never know.

This is not a statement of support. It is a statement of confused grief.

After misinterpreting this as fervent support, you proceeded to speculate wildly about BoRegardless's motivations and his late friend's addiction, levy criticism based on that speculation, and recommend that he read a story about being trapped in a hellish existence where death is the only escape.

In response to a person who just said that his friend had died. Yesterday.

The article is talking about a surgery that is performed only in China, only for research purposes, and only with worldwide condemnation. The only debate outside of China is whether the results of that research should be published in respectable journals.

Your comment did not address that debate. It will have zero effect on what happens in China. The only thing it does is attack and belittle someone who just lost a friend. In your zeal to put on a show of righteousness on the internet, you are stepping all over the real human being who is (metaphorically) right in front of you.

To say that this lacks compassion would be an understatement.

Abuses

[betterunixthanunix]

Perspective? Lobotomy began with extremely careful scraping of the brain, meant to do the absolute minimum damage possible. Then some greedy quack in the USA took it to a ridiculous extreme, turning a nice young lady into a wheelchair-bound mess because her stuck-up family was worried about their social standing, and that soon degenerated into a procedure that should have been called a crime against humanity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transorbital_lobotomy

If your drug addiction is going to kill you in the next 6 months

There are no certainties about that sort of thing, but there is a certainty about the sort of brain-damaging lobotomy described in TFA: it is irreversible and destructive.

Re:I'll auto-Godwin myself

[hairyfeet]

"Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart...hey wait a minute, there is one guy controlling both puppets!"...Bill Hicks. The man has been gone more than 20 years and its even more true now than it was back then.

I urge all of those who think "If only my party got control things would be better" to watch the truth about voting and ask yourself some simple questions like : How many decades have been people voting for less government intrusion? less war? Less handing out billions to third world thugs? hell how many years have we been complaining and voting about the horribly broken borders? the corruption? the influence of lobbyists?

At the end of the day you can NEVER change a corrupt system by working within that system, why? Well the answer is obvious, its corrupt! That would be like handing a petition to some corrupt police force demanding they stop taking bribes...why would they care what you think? Like pro wrestling its all kayfabe and thanks to the revolving door between the corps and government today's senator will be tomorrow's lobbyist so by voting him out all you are doing is giving him a pay raise while letting someone else get a shot at the money!

Re:I'll auto-Godwin myself

[TFAFalcon]

But if you think about this it's actually a pretty lousy argument. It makes your conception the most important fact in history. Think how many other IFs you could justify just to make yourself happen. 'If your mother hadn't been raped, you wouldn't have happened. If your father hadn't had one of his balls shot off you wouldn't have happened. If Hitler hadn't existed your parents wouldn't have met. If Nagasaki hadn't been bombed the celebration of the end of the war would have been a day later so you wouldn't have happened,.......' Once you start thinking like that EVERYTHING that happened becomes a good thing, since it resulted in the miracle of YOU. So why not look at it without such selfish thought. If your parents filtered out that gene, they would have had the child without that gene. That's it.

Re:I'll auto-Godwin myself

[eugene ts wong]

Moderators, please mod him up as informative. Here is the take away paragraph.

Early data suggests that a period of approximately two years of intermittent treatments may be required to attain the goal of long-term abstinence from narcotics and stimulants for many patients. The majority of patients treated with Ibogaine remain free from chemical dependence for a period of three to six months after a single dose. Approximately ten percent of patients treated with Ibogaine remain free of chemical dependence for two or more years from a single treatment and an equal percentage return to drug use within two weeks after treatment. Multiple administrations of Ibogaine over a period of time are generally more effective in extending periods of abstinence. It is noteworthy that twenty-nine of the thirty-five patients successfully treated with Ibogaine had numerous unsuccessful experiences with other treatment modalities.