The 12-year-old lobotomised for being naughty

[littlebabyjesus]

This is a horrific story of abuse. 40,000 people in the US were lobotomised, 20,000 in the UK. That's 60,000 people who had their personalities taken from them, and a study done at the time showed that one third of patients' original symptoms improved, one third remained unchanged, one third got worse. It didn't even work on its own stupid terms.

As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. Freeman would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth. Then he would do the same thing on the other side of the face.

It was a 10-minute 'operation'. Barbaric. We now know that is where we form our morals, our values, our aspirations. It is central to our self esteem.

Are there any operations we do now, do you think, that history will judge us for?

 

[radio_atomica]

Circumcision of boys for non-medical reasons I hope, also not accepted as okay in the west but still happens in some places in the world, female genital mutilation.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I know treatments like chemotherapy are crude and nasty and don't even work that well. But they are all we've got in the face of a fatal illness, so even when better treatments consign chemo to history, it shouldn't be judged too harshly.

But lobotomy was just a licence to sadists to destroy lives. How was that allowed to happen?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Here's the wiki entry on the area they were destroying.

Lobotomy basically destroyed the person's ability to reflect on the consequences of their actions. That is central to being human. If you cannot step back and reflect, are you even conscious in any meaningful way any more?

I would just hope that the kid was young enough that his brain could relearn some of these things in another area.

 

[Mrs Magpie]

I think the over-use of drugs like ritalin for young children.

 

[Clair De Lune]

Unneccesary medical procedures should not be encouraged imo. Counselling should be offered to see if a persons confidence in their natural self can be improved before putting them at risk for the sake of conforming to their idea of body perfection.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

This is a little bit different because it was her choice, but I saw a close-up of Esther Rantzen's face the other day, and it looks like she has someone else's skin stretched across her face. It's quite horrible in fact. I don't understand why people think looking old with a stretched face that can no longer show your emotions properly is better than looking old with a bit of a baggy face that is still recognisably you.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I think the over-use of drugs like ritalin for young children.

Pharmaceuticals certainly took over from surgery and are can be used in just as crude a fashion - and long term use can fuck somebody over just as effectively as surgery. (Interestingly, psychosurgery and ECT these days are now orders of magnitude better than the Cuckoo's Nest sort of thing. I've been reading entries by somebody I sort of know who's having ECT at the moment, perfectly voluntarily.)

 

[kyser_soze]

Are there any operations we do now, do you think, that history will judge us for?

Only if people continue to impose contemporary moral standards on the past, yes they will. The work of the barber churgeon's is still considered by many to be unecessary butchery, often carried out on unwilling subjects, but it laid the groundwork for many modern surgical techniques. Calling lobotomy a licence for sadists - what grounds do you have to justify this statement?

 

[scifisam]

Ritalin - or at least overprescription of it - is the one that came to mind for me too.

This is a little bit different because it was her choice, but I saw a close-up of Esther Rantzen's face the other day, and it looks like she has someone else's skin stretched across her face. It's quite horrible in fact. I don't understand why people think looking old with a stretched face that can no longer show your emotions properly is better than looking old with a bit of a baggy face that is still recognisably you.

She's spent her entire television career being told she's ugly and old, and her female contemporaries have been sacked for the same. It's not surprising she opted for surgery.

 

[ymu]

Radical mastectomy and high dose chemotherapy for breast cancer are both modern examples, where bad practice still goes on today. (Story of these two starts on page 14 of the doc, which is page 31 of the .pdf.)

 

[ymu]

IV fluids are routinely given for shock due to blood loss, as is oxygen after a heart attack; the evidence is crap, but what there is suggests that these are harmful. A huge trial into IV fluids failed, because the paramedics gave IV fluids to the same number of people in both arms of the trial because they refused to believe it could be harmful. Oxygen after a heart attack has not been tested at all yet, for similar reasons.

There's loads of examples. We have no idea how many people we are killing/harming because most treatments we use have never been tested.

 

[kalmatthew]

Oxygen after a heart attack has not been tested at all yet, for similar reasons.

The latest guidlens issued on O2 administration in a prehospital enviroment is not to give O2 to MI sufferes unless there O2 saturation is poss and in which case a minimal level should be given to return normal levels.
(Drugs - Oxygen from JRCALC http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/med/r...alcstakeholderwebsite/clinicalpracticeupdates )

 

[ymu]

The latest guidlens issued on O2 administration in a prehospital enviroment is not to give O2 to MI sufferes unless there O2 saturation is poss and in which case a minimal level should be given to return normal levels.
(Drugs - Oxygen from JRCALC http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/med/r...alcstakeholderwebsite/clinicalpracticeupdates )

No evidence for using it at all. It's all guesswork and gently gently coaxing medics into changing practice.

 

[G. Fieendish]

I think the over-use of drugs like ritalin for young children.

I agree, as there is the tendency to view Ritalin (a class B Drug), as a panacea for controlling children with ADHD, although some would argue that in reality, it's a "chemical cosh", used in lieu of other therapys, mainly due to cost reasons ..
The main danger with Ritalin, is that it raises blood pressure, leading in extreme cases, to myocardical infarctions in teenagers...
(There was a infamous case in the U.S, a couple of years ago where a 15 year old died of a heart attack, & it was found that he had been taking Ritalin every day for 6 years, having been perscribed it at the age of 8 to deal with his ADHD...).

 

[Cid]

IV fluids are routinely given for shock due to blood loss, as is oxygen after a heart attack; the evidence is crap, but what there is suggests that these are harmful. A huge trial into IV fluids failed, because the paramedics gave IV fluids to the same number of people in both arms of the trial because they refused to believe it could be harmful. Oxygen after a heart attack has not been tested at all yet, for similar reasons.

There's loads of examples. We have no idea how many people we are killing/harming because most treatments we use have never been tested.

Yes but how can you possibly conduct an ethical set of trials on something like that?

 

[ymu]

Yes but how can you possibly conduct an ethical set of trials on something like that?

For any trial to take place, there has to be equipoise - genuine uncertainty as to the best course of action. That's why it is so hard to trial things that seem logical and that we've been doing for years - medics find it very hard to step back.

The ethics of continuing to use a treatment which might well be killing people are far worse, of course. The IV fluids trial took place, but the paramedics involved widely ignored the assigned treatment, so the results are uninterpretable. There's a trial from the states which suggests it's killing people, but that's mostly penetrating trauma from knives and guns, whereas here we mostly see blunt trauma from car accidents. They haven't changed practice either.

It's not a question you can answer without a trial - people who've had IV fluids are more likely to die than those that have not because the sickest people are the most likely to get fluids. We won't have an answer without comparing results from a policy of not using fluids to a policy of using them. Both approaches have strong pathophysiological reasoning behind them, we can only know by testing them.