hi, I’m jarbabyj and I’m addicted to The Learning Channel.
Hi jarbaby
Last night on Wierd World, they talked about medical hoaxes and alternative medicine (psychic surgery, crystals, source healing)…but what got me all riled up was Trepination.
Drilling a hole in the skull (or several apparently) to achieve a higher consciousness and personal awareness. They featured a woman who performed A HOME TREPINATION WITH NO ANESTHETIC AND FILMED IT.
READ THAT AGAIN…I implore you.
Listen, I have no beef if people honestly believe that they’re achieving some religious experience. I can’t prove that they are either way…
My beefs (or questions) are…aren’t these people making their skull weaker and more vulnerable to injury by drilling holes into it? Aren’t they submitting themselves to extreme danger of drilling into their brain? What about infection? I mean how did this woman know when to stop drilling? How did she know she wouldn’t have a muscle spasm and kill herself?
And frankly, this is an opinion question…I have a very high threshold of pain, very high, I can put up with a TON of stuff…but how are these people just sitting still in a chair, having their heads cut open and MOTORIZED DRILLS stuck into their skulls?
Websites on trepaning are usually (I’ve found) all pro, new-agey, mystical…except for this one which features a history of the process and the tools used. Still, no one seems to be warning people that this process is nutso!
My WAG with regard to the pain side of things: the only pain will be felt from the nerves in the skin on the skull as the brain itself cannot be ‘felt’ in that sense, and I don’t think you can ‘feel’ bone. In my experience, head cuts without severe impact don’t hurt that much, even when copious amounts of blood seem to gush out (god bless rugby).
Warning: this could be bollocks due to head trauma.
I hope this practice becomes more well known and popular. In the long run it would probably raise the average intelligence of the species if this became a fad.
:rolleyes: It’s an astounding amount of glurge. I’d be interested in having some of our Doper medicos take a gander and give us their opinion. But, for the sake of your keyboards, not with food in your mouth. Splort alert…
Suffice it to say that: As we all know, if you have decreased blood flow to your brain, you get dizzy, right? So if you improve blood flow to your brain, you ought to have improved consciousness, right? Now, since homo sapiens walks upright, of course the blood doesn’t flow properly to our brains, because gravity pulls it downward. So you want to increase the amount of blood in your brain. However, there is also another fluid in your brain, called “cerebro-spinal fluid”. It takes up valuable space that could be occupied by blood. If you could push some of the “brain water” out, then you could get more blood in, and you’d have increased consciousness. If you can create increased pressure on the cranium, this will squeeze the brain water out, and it will go down the sheaths of the nerve channels running down your spine. And then more blood will rush into your brain to take up the space that was formerly occupied by brain water.
So the best and most natural way to increase the pressure in the cranium is to get the heart to beat harder and force more blood into your brain capillaries. This pulsating power, however, is at its strongest in infants. We know this because infants have that “soft spot” on the tops of their heads, and the infant’s heart is actually pulsating hard enough that you can actually see the capillaries pulsating. However, as soon as the soft spot grows over, the power of the heart to push more blood into the brain is diminished. [you think I’m making this up, don’t you? See for yourself.]
Truly awesome.
I am assuming that people who hear about this and who take a Black & Decker to their skulls end up not with Greater Enlightenment, but with a tour of their local hospital. The trepanation.com website (whose Q & A page, incidentally, where they promise–
–gives a Page Not Found), has a huge disclaimer at the bottom of their “Operation” page http://www.trepanation.com./master4.htm . “WARNING! The Trepanation Trust does not recommend the practice of self-trepanation”.
Duck, perhaps one of the reasons I can’t find anything is because I’m spelling it wrong! is it trepination or trepAnation? I see that you have the A spelling, but when I search the I spelling I get hundreds of sites.
I conclude that it’s nutso. In my humble opinion, it’s nutso from both a spiritual AND physical standpoint…but like I’ve said before…
A trephine is “a surgical instrument for cutting out circular sections (as of bone or corneal tissue),” and the trephine is also a transitive verb. However, trepan is “to use a trephine on (the skull).”
Google gives 2710 hits for “trepanation” and only 23 for “trepination.” Plus, one for “trepinition,” but that’s from the lyrics for a song called “Raining Brains” by some kind of a metal band (I think.)
Given that these are people who drill holes in their skulls they have admirable spelling skills.
jarbaby, I’ve seen two (apparently equally correct) spellings: “trephination” and “trepanation”. Both appear in Webster’s Online. As a spiritual/psych practice, I consider it absolutely, positively, <PHWEET> “Hey, you–Outta the gene pool NOW!” nuts. This is a whole new level of nutso–before this thread, I had no idea that anyone would even consider doing this to themselves. Ick.
As a medical procedure for the treatment of subdural hematoma, it appears to have some value.
<Apologetically relating anecdote in GQ>
A friend of mine in college dated a neurosurgeon (very briefly). One fine evening, she was out to dinner with him when he received an emergency page–some poor fellow had been in a car accident and required his immediate attentions. My friend had no way home, so she accompanied him to the hospital. For reasons best described as “morbid curiosity”, she scrubbed, gowned, and followed him into the OR as well. Soon after, she was mistaken for an intern, handed a rather nasty-looking instrument, and instructed to drill a hole in the fellow’s head to relieve the pressure. She claims that she was sorely tempted, but declined (I personally doubt that she would have hesitated to drill away). The guy survived, despite losing some gray matter to suction (“There goes seventh grade…”).
That was her last date with the neurosurgeon.
</Apologetically relating anecdote in GQ>
The Inca used to practice trepination and they would replace the cut out bone with gold. I think that it would be cool to have a small square cut out of my skull and covered with some clear plastic.
I would, except my 3/8"-drive, variable-speed Craftsman slipped and I put a 1/4" hole in my speech center. Ooops.
BTW, I have a patent-pending B&D 1/4" from, what? about 1927? that was my grandfather’s and it still works fine except I had to replace the plug about thirty years ago. Wish B&D stuff still worked so well. But the speed is too high to trepann without burning bone.
It’s frightening to think there are people in this world who would actually be better off if they joined a nice normal cult like the Scientologists or the Moonies. They’re already stupid, they’d be broke, but at least they would be discouraged from playing with power tools.
Is there a nice, convenient, home trepanation kit? Not some cheap-o Ronco job, or Craftsman. Something good and dependable, like, say…Black and Decker. Yeah, Black and Decker, good tools, even if they do make irons and toasters now. See, I have these voices in my head, I think they’re evil spirits or something. They give me these awful headaches at times, and a Home Trepanation Kit would be just the thing. I saw the Trepanation Episode of Hysteria!, you know the kid’s cartoon “we make fun of history…la la la…” And if I pop a hole in my skull they could just float out, and…
that’s exactly how I feel about Mad Cow disease Podkayne, I apologize for the spelling error. To be honest, I couldn’t remember the spelling from the night before…and the first spelling I entered into google was trepination…and when results came up, I figured it was correct. I should have researched further and I apologize again.
