Back in elementary school, I had a teacher who was particularly fond of repeating urban legends and FOAF stories. One story she told us concerned a bedridden woman who was slowly dying of some horrible disease which left her lower body in constant agonizing pain. As pharmaceutical painkillers were not helping, and seeing as her condition was terminal, the doctors “snipped her spinal cord” somewhere below her arms, which had the effect of paralyzing her but also of numbing the pain.
Naturally, as I was just a kid at the time, I had no trouble believing this, but in all the years since I’ve never heard of anyone undergoing a similar drastic treatment. What say ye Dopers? Do terminally ill patients with severe pain unresponsive to standard treatments ever undergo voluntary surgical paralysis so that they can live out their last days in peace?
I’d be skeptical of claims of “snipping the spinal cord”, but it’s certainly conceivable. Larry Flynt, of Hustler fame, underwent a procedure to destroy nerves in his lower spine that were causing chronic pain but otherwise doing him no good, but care was taken to restrict the nerves involved to just the ones causing trouble, they didn’t just knock him out and start hacking away. Severing or destroying a nerve is not to be done lightly, but when you get down to it it’s really no more bizarre than amputating a cancerous limb. Both are drastic procedures not to be done lightly, but justifiable in some circumstances.
They certainly do procedures to snip or destroy nerves to treat pain or other problems. They just don’t do them very frequently, since there are usually less drastic measures that provide sufficient pain relief. Also, according to neurologist V.S. Ramachandran in his book Phantoms in the Brain, when this kind of surgery is done (and amputations of limbs that are in pain, too) the patient often feels excrucating phantom pain that is, obviously, even more difficult to treat than the original pain.
It’s actually called a cordotomy and is not too rare a procedure.