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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.
They worked out so well last time.
is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are? Is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are?
is it worth reading slashdot, if, reading it means reading poorly edited summaries like these? Is it worth reading slashdot, if, reading it means reading poorly edited summaries like these?
Couldn't control his drug issues. His birth mother was addicted.
Now he 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.
When it comes to a real problem a change in personality wouldn't be such a problem, but losing dopamine forever? Never to feel positive emptions again ever? I don't care who you are that's not worth it. Surely the reason people get addicted to begin with is they don't have enough dopamine and serotonin in their life for whatever reason.
"is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are? Is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are?"
I suspect that OP might have already had such an operation...
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.
The story sucks, but I have to wonder. We do some radical brain surgeries at times just to fix problems with seizures. At least in the long term addiction carries a higher incidental rate of death, lowered quality of life, and such than seizures.
So I guess I'd have to say 'it depends'. I'd view it a bit the same as stomach stapling for weight loss -
I'd need to know a heck of a lot more about the details of the surgery - primary effects, dangers, side effects, success rates, etc...
Does it result in an unmotivated zombie, because there's no longer any reward for doing so much as life maintenance tasks? Can they still feel pleasure? Is it only being used on the most serious 'mental' addiction cases? I added mental because this wouldn't solve physical addictions to things like heroin, I think, but might help solve addictions to gambling, stealing, etc...
Going by the article, it seems to only stop addictions 10% better than traditional methods, and is still well under half. 60% have serious side effects, so I'm going to go with 'nope, not worth it, keep looking'.
As for 'losing who you are', well, even just day to day life you change. I'm not the same person I was a decade ago. Technically I'm not the person I was yesterday. If somebody wants to change, it might be worth it.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
Even with the size of chinese doctors, I imagine one would be a large handful.
Are you truly who you think you are when you are addicted to drugs?
Are the pleasures a drug-affected brain feels to be equated with other forms of pleasure?
It would be one thing to wipe-out part of a healthy brain (thereby permanently altering it) like this but it might be another matter to make such a permanent change to a brain that has already had permanent, and negative, changes made by "modern chemistry". Of course, the presence of any pre-existing damage from drugs also raises questions of true consent. Not sure how I feel on this one, but given that this is on brains already affected by drugs the morals and ethics are a bit cloudier than they might otherwise be. Personally, I find the idea of depriving a person of the ability to experience pleasure both creepy and dangerous. Should we expect future headlines about "zombie" violence in China?
Most of the West, the U.S. included, was big on this kind of "experimentation" (i.e. lobotomies as a kind of medical treatment) a few decades ago. No need for Hitler here.
On a positive note, much of our current knowledge of how the human brain works comes from destruction of various kinds, either from intentional and misguided treatment or from strokes. The side effects are often interesting.
Dr. John Adler, professor emeritus of neurosurgery at Stanford University, collaborated with the Chinese researchers on the publication and is listed as a co-author. While he does not advocate the surgery and did not perform it, he believes it can provide valuable information about how the nucleus accumbens works, and how best to attempt to manipulate it. “I do think it’s worth learning from,” he says. ” As far as I’m concerned, ablation of the nucleus accumbens makes no sense for anyone. There’s a very high complication rate. [But] reporting it doesn’t mean endorsing it. While we should have legitimate ethical concerns about anything like this, it is a bigger travesty to put our heads in the sand and not be willing to publish it,” he says. cite.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
From the time I was 12 until the time I was 48, I spent most of every day thinking about sex, and wanting it desperately, and sometimes even getting it. Then one day my sex drive...faded. I couldn't get it up any more, I couldn't get it off any more, and underneath all that, I didn't care about it so much any more. That incessant, gnawing hunger was gone.
I miss it terribly.
I've been to my doctors, and they've poked and prodded, and run this test and that test, and prescribed this pill and that pill, and with time and the right pills, some of it has come back, but it's not like it used to be.
I never got all that much sex, but it turns out that wanting it, and sometimes getting it, was a big part of what kept me going. Now that it isn't there, I've had to rethink some pretty basic things, like why I get up in the morning, and why I bother to do my job, given that I can't get what I really want any more.
Yep the rest of the world only stopped with the eugenics, forced sterilizations and routine lobotomies because Hitler made them uncool.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You can cure thievery by cutting off hands.
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The first transorbital lobotomy was performed in 1946, one year after Hilter's death.
Lobotomies stopped being routine in the 70's.
No need to Godwin yourself. Checkout what the Canadians were up to (with a little funding from the CIA): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron#Project_MKULTRA
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
This has been tried for years even in the USA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilateral_cingulotomy The only scientifically validated results are for treatment of depression.
What if they were treating pedophiles instead of dopers?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Meanwhile, in America, they do surgeries to remove a part of BABIES' PENISES.
Pot, kettle, and all that shit.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The worst thing about this is that it is totally uneccesary. There was a study in the '60s that showed that targeted therapy in combination with psychedelic drugs can cure addiction with a very high success rate (compared to other methods) and almost no side effects. After lsd was made illegal research stopped but recently people have continued the program with ibogaine. The research is still far too preliminary for conclusive results but the fact that a potential treatment exists makes brain surgery even more inadvisable.
This is possibly the single worst thing that the Nazis did. They turned the world away from eugenics, because they were so cold hearted and calloused toward an entire race.
In and of itself, eugenics is a good thing. I would love to see it advanced. The research could lead to the cures for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, possibly even make our entire race stronger and smarter. The possibilities are endless.
But, because eugenics were so horrible abused by one group of people, against another group of people, we refuse to even look down that road.
I don't suppose that science will advance on that frontier unless and until a significant portion of mankind has left mother earth. I just hope that by then, the researchers haven't forgotten the atrocities committed by the nazis. The memories must be preserved, or mankind risks repeating those same atrocities.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Oh, that's scary what Cameron did, especially considering that "he had been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946â"47." Seems like the counterpoint to "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." It's more like he took the Nazi's inhumane human experimentation as inspiration for his kooky and secretly carried out experiments (the patients did not know they were being experimented upon) rather than as a warning of the level of depravity that can be reached by man's inhumanity to man.
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This is the kind of example that shows how ordinarily mundane the evil of the Nazis, the syphilis experimentation in Tuskegee, and these secret mind experiment crapola really was. There was no evil evil mastermind with a grand evil plan (well, except for Hitler, that was a grand plan, eh?), just ordinary people doing awful and evil things.
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.
Palm trees and 8
Why does everything have to be "part of who you are!!!"
My wisdom teeth were part of me. I'm glad they're not anymore. An epileptic's seizures are part of who he is. Most are pretty happy when they're suppressed.
The real question is, is being cured of addiction worth not being able to feel pleasure anymore, especially if its the only option? If that's actually what the surgery does. This IS slashdot.
Surgery saves all that time with the eyedrops.
You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge... or hustle.
Can't find it offhand, but there was an interesting TED talk a while back by a fellow who had received repeated ECT treatments. I forget the details, but the gist was that he had been a respected professor until he suffered a mental illness that sent his life spiraling into oblivion. When all the less radical treatments failed, ECT managed to fix the problem and he was able to rebuild his life. No argument that there have been some horrible abuses in the past, but it does seem that there are situations where it is in fact the best option available. As with *any* neurological treatment though, I think the consent of the patient is absolutely crucial - forcibly altering someone's mind without their consent seems to me to be about the worst form of rape imaginable.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I wonder if this is a $cientology anti-psychiatry rant.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Actually I'd say they learned from the Japs, after all the Japs made the crazy Austrian look like a humanitarian when it came to human experiments. The worst part is unlike the Nazis we let most of the monsters left in Japan walk to get their data whereas with the Nazis we mainly went after the eggheads making rockets and jet engines, not the guys doing human testing.
as for TFA we tried that kind of stuff before, it was called a lobotomy, made the symptoms go away alright and left a broken doll in place of a human being. We are talking about obliterating the pleasure center of the brain so they will NEVER feel pleasure again, i bet a good 70%+ end up committing suicide in 5 years or less. Hell it would be more humane to just take them out back and treat them with a 45cal to the back of the head.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"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!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm not in favor of forced sterilization, but at least the person would have other reasons to go on living.
But I must be missing something here, because shouldn't the question be:
Is it worth it to cure addiction if you utterly destroy everything that makes life worth living?
How could any rational person think this is a good idea?
I agree. The 16 year old girl who has sex with her 15 year old boyfriend should be sterilized, and part of her brain should be destroyed.
Well, if the purpose is to punish the sinner and terrorize the potential sinners, then irreversible zombification certainly works better than mere prison sentences, and is thus rational. After all, it's not like locking up pot smokers is intended to help them, but to destroy their lives as thoroughly as possible.
Expect this to become a new weapon in the War on Drugs in the West, too.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
Why not let it be up to the parents. Let them make up any value judgements on their own genes. And if they decide their genes are 'defective', they can always adopt.
Yes, Rosemary Kennedy is a famous example of an abuse of lobotomy. Her case was particularly cruel, because the doctors did not stop cutting into her brain until she was unable to speak coherently.
Palm trees and 8
It's almost exclusively used for major major MAJOR depression that's totally unresponsive to every other treatment - you certainly aren't healthy, but you're oriented in the spheres of person, place and time when you give your informed consent. It's probably a reverse cause though; I think (and Wiki agrees) it has shown some effectiveness in psychosis and schizophrenia but when you're loony like that you can't give consent so they can't zap you...it isn't the 50s anymore.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Moderators, please mod him up as informative. Here is the take away paragraph.
testing out my trending skills
Moderators, please mod him up as informative. Here is the take away paragraph.
Sorry, I do have points, but... No can do, on the upmod. If you spend some time on any of the sites that are genuinely run by and for addicts and ex-addicts, you will find many, many personal stories posted by sometimes desperate addicts who have actually tried ibogaine therapy. The basic message seems to be, no, it does not work, with actual results that are a far cry from the way the drug has sometimes been portrayed in the media and in the few very limited and suspect studies done to date. Ibogaine is in the same category as so-called "ultra-rapid detox" type treatments, which is to say that while it does have its true believers, the vast majority of those who actually undergo the treatment don't see anything remotely like the promised results. Most discover this to their chagrin only after spending huge amounts of money. The sad truth is, there is currently no overnight and/or one-time procedure that will cure addiction. Of course there isn't, it's an extremely complex and still imperfectly understood condition with causes deeply-rooted in both personality and brain chemistry. So like the mythical free lunch, there simply is no such thing as a miracle cure for addiction, and I don't see much hope there ever will be.