Frontal lobotomy

[Jophiel]

What was the deal with these? In other words, how was this supposed to cure anything? Given the nature of the brain, I'd think cutting out chunks of it wouldn't do much besides kill the patient and I don't doubt more than one person died on the table.
Were they ever sucessful in that they solved the medical condition without rendering the person a zombie?

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"I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn't."

[Chief Crunch]

The procedure was invented by Egas Moniz in 1935 when the field of neurology was still small. He believed that serious mental disorders were caused by fixed thoughts that interfered with normal thinking. He basically thought by cutting nerve pathways in the brain, he could free the mind from these fixed thoughts. It acutally did nothing more than rendering said person a zombie, but since society wanted to believe there was a panacea for severe mental illnesses, it went unchecked. It's kind of the same philosophy that sending shocks of electricity through one's brain (ECT) is a good idea, too. There was also up to a 6% fatality rate and horrible side effects like seizures. They're very rarely, if ever, performed today.

[Yeah]

I think the idea was to improve the patient's quality of life, not to cure him. Before antipsychotics became available, there wasn't much to be done with violent, severely disturbed psychotics except chain them up or put them in a padded cell. In some cases at least, such unfortunate people seemed to be better off after lobotomy since they might be able to walk and talk and live without restraints. However, they weren't "cured" amd although they weren't necessarily turned into "zombies" the effect on personality was severe making doctors question just how much an improvement was made in the patient's quality of life. In any case, now we have antipsychotic drugs that help relieve psychotic symptoms without the permanent damage caused by lobotomies.

Electroconvulsive shock (ECT), by the way, is an effective treatment for many cases of severe (and I mean SEVERE) depression not responsive to antidepressant drugs. Since severely depressed people are at risk of killing themselves, I am sure that ECT has saved many more lives than it has cost. Nowadays, by the way, in the rare cases where ECT is the only hope, it is done in an operating room under anesthesia and is relatively safe.

[handy]

It's not called that now. They have a much gentler wording, but I forgot what it is.

One guy with OCD shot himself thru the mouth & the bullet ripped the front of his brain giving himself a lobotomy & curing his OCD. Wouldn't suggest it though.

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"Men are like parking spaces, the available ones are handicapped."

[TwistofFate]

*Stealing someone's sig*
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"

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J
Because Fido ate the Hand Grenade for me,
When the Tans came round to search the house at tea,
I said, "Take this, dog, and eat",
He thought it was a can of meat,
It was the hand grenade that Fido ate for me.

[Johnny L.A.]

Damn, John! You beat be to it!

That line was used in two songs I know of. One was a thinly-veiled jab at Jimmy and Billy Carter, and the other was Existential Blues by "T-Bone" Stankus (or Stanka).

[tomndebb]

Yeah's comments are quite likely to drag this over to GD (or even the Pit), so before that happens, I'd just like to point out that (before we had a GD Forum) there has already been a rancorous discussion on the topic in the very early days of this MB:

http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000010.html

Which was a response to Cecil's column, but I haven't found that.

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Tom~

[Germ Boy]

Yeah, I started the post and was moderately proud at the rants it spawned. Haven't heard from any of the more vociferous opponents recently. Probably at home with aluminum foil on the windows. Catty, sorry.

[handy]

"Probably at home with aluminum foil on the windows"

What's with that anyway? I know a guy who does that & it doesn't make much sense.

[Jophiel]

Ok.. how did they decide which section to carve out? Trial and error? Some sort of primitive CAT scan? Poking at it with a pointy stick?

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"I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn't."

[AHunter3]

a) They still do it. The euphemism is "psychosurgery", or more precise terms like "leukotomy" or "transorbital electroincision"

b) I would not be quick to point to electroconvulsive therapy (i.e., electroshock) as a particulary benign alternative. ECT owes its effectiveness to its ability to do brain damage, a temporary side effect of which is euphoria, and a permanent direct effect of which is permanent memory loss. In depressed persons, short-term euphoria coupled with memory loss makes them...well, you figure it out. For further info, check out Peter Breggin's book on the subject.

c) As with most psychiatric treatments (including pharmaceuticals), the focus has not been on generating a result that pleases the patient but rather on generating a result that causes the patient to cease to be an irritant to others. Lobotomized, shocked, and/or drugged people are more tractable.

d) They did a very large number of lobotomies in the fifties using what was essentially a sterile ice pick: slide it between eyeball and inner canthus, through the thin bone behind, and into the prefrontal lobe, wiggle back and forth, and remove. One doctor was photographed doing two simultaneously, one with each hand.

e) Many of the "vegetables" could still walk and talk and dress themselves, could hold conversations, even jobs (albeit menial ones). The procedure just drops your IQ 30-60 points and reduces the extent to which any ideas have emotional content for you. If it had made everyone into a comatose vegetable it would not have been anywhere near as popular.

[Arnold Winkelried]

Originally posted by AHunter3:
e) Many of the "vegetables" could still walk and talk and dress themselves, could hold conversations, even jobs (albeit menial ones). The procedure just drops your IQ 30-60 points and reduces the extent to which any ideas have emotional content for you. If it had made everyone into a comatose vegetable it would not have been anywhere near as popular.

It is generally believed that actress Frances Farmer was subjected to a trans-orbital lobotomy, but after being released from the hospital she appeared on television and even hosted her own television show, "Frances Farmer Presents", for six years. (Please, no cracks about TV hosts.)

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Official winner of Bricker Challenge #5.

[Chief Crunch]

"Probably at home with aluminum foil on the windows"
What's with that anyway? I know a guy who does that & it doesn't make much sense.

One of the possible characteristics of schizophrenia is the belief that an outside force is "stealing or controlling" one's thoughts. In our modem society, some schizophrenics usually believe this is caused by satellites or aliens and somehow believe if they cover their head or the windows in aluminum foil, they can "block" the signals. As for why that region of the brain was chosen, it controls functions like memory, anxiety and higher emotion. The reasoning being, if you want to rid of "fixed thoughts" and negative emotion, just slice into the part of the brain responsible for them.

[Lucretia]

Having lived on several military bases with large numbers of shift workers, I know that many of them taped foil to their windows in order to totally block out the light so they could sleep during the day.

I suppose some of them could have been trying to prevent alien radio waves as well....would have explained a lot.

[Yeah]

[quote]Originally posted by AHunter3:

"b) I would not be quick to point to electroconvulsive therapy (i.e., electroshock) as a particulary benign alternative."

Thank goodness for that.

[quote]Originally posted by AHunter3:

"c) As with most psychiatric treatments (including pharmaceuticals), the focus has not been on generating a result that pleases the patient but rather on generating a result that causes the patient to cease to be an irritant to others."

How does one go about identifying "a result that pleases the patient" when the patient is, for example, catatonic? Perhaps catatonics are happy sitting all day in their own excrement and nothing should be done for them? Is that right?

[NanoByte]

Well, years ago I was stationed at Ft. Meade (where you list yourself). I had night duty a SAGE radar installation there. Not much to do, so sneaked a lot of sleep on duty, then explored caves in VA and WV in the daytime. Had all the aliens under control with the radar, so didn't tape up any aluminum foil, but got bored enough once to tape up some choice words on a radome, with black tape. The brass wasn't happy at all about whoever did that. Does ECT help boredom? . . .better than SDMB, that is?

Ray

[NanoByte]

Oh, and I wonder if they performed occipital lobotomy on that motorcyclist whose head got twisted around in that accident. . .before they figured his score out a bit better. Well, you know those docs -- don't teach 'em much topology in med school.

Ray (Doctor, my eyes!)

[Irishman]

Originally posted by Jophiel:
Ok.. how did they decide which section to carve out? Trial and error? Some sort of primitive CAT scan? Poking at it with a pointy stick?

It was based on a lot of previous research into the brain. First came lots of studies on brains, trying to determine how they worked. They did such fun things as severing the links between the two hemispheres and running tests to see how people perceived things, remembered them, etc. These studies led to the realization that the region of the brain related to "higher thought" and personality were located in the frontal lobes. Thus the lobotomy was a procedure developed to kill some of the cells in the frontal lobes - lobes, lobotomy, get it? The trick was they determined a fairly non-invasive procedure (small probe through the brain case vs. sawing the skull open) that would yield the desired results - psychotics and wild patients having much tamer behavior.

Trial and error is not an entirely improper description.

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

Our local hospital is having a special: get a lobotomy, and they throw in afree vasectomy-NO EXTRA CHARGE!

They call it their "little off each end " sale.

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It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.

[Lucretia]

How long ago was this, Nanobyte? I imagine you got quite the excited reaction from your chain. So far, the only aliens I've seen here at the Fort are all those Army people.

[BigPoppa]

The prefrontal lobotomy, or: "How I won the Nobel Prize without doing any solid research." Moniz actually based his procedure on one chimpanzee. One. This ill-tempered chimp turned into a passive, docile ape after his prefrontal cortex was severed in the lab. Moniz went gung-ho on humans and got famous. Interestingly, one of the results of this operation is that it interrupts the feedback loop between the frontal cortex and the limbic regions - so, you have feelings/emotions, but you don't fixate on them. A friend of mine who does neurosurgury says that they still do them on patients who have extreme cancer pain, and that if you do it right, the results diminish in about 6 months. The sufferers still feel pain, but it doesn't bother them nearly as much. As a postscriptural ode to the goddess Irony, Moniz was shot by one of his lobotomized victims and paralyzed. Didn't work so good on that one, Egar.