Controversial Surgery for Addiction Burns Away Part of the Brain

http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/13/controversial-surgery-for-addiction-burns-away-brains-pleasure-center/

by 4ad • 14 years ago

33 45 14 years ago

healthland.time.com

Dirlewanger2• 14 years ago

Maybe it's just me and my warped mind, but there's a part of me that incredibly fascinated with the amount of boundaries that countries like China are pushing (medical, human rights, etc.) with a dearth of any kind of ethical oversight whatsoever. They are rapidly approaching the West's level of technological sophistication but yet they've come down a completely different path...one devoid of any kind of power-checking, one that does not care of what the public thinks/will think or even what groups in other countries think. It's...quite the sight in the modern world.

revelation• 14 years ago

This just seems to be the chinese equivalent of the Lobotomy [1]. I guess one can learn how to create Aluminium and bend steel, but ethics?

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy

eitland2• 14 years ago

Nah, they are just a few years behind us. The sad truth truth is our parents classmates got lobotomy, our grandparents classmates were sent to Auswitch etc.

The western civilization has not always been very civilized. (And some people would argue it still isn't..)

merlincorey• 14 years ago

> I guess one can learn how to create Aluminum

Alchemy! Aluminium (aka aluminum) is a basic chemical element.

zalew3• 14 years ago

> They are rapidly approaching the West's level of technological sophistication

really? a few months ago one of their rapid trains crashed into another because a lightning strike disabled it's system and the following one didn't even know the hit one slowed down. all other super rails have systems and procedures to prevent such occurences (let's not even get started on the Japanese one). say what you want, I wouldn't want to live or work in one of those Chinese 'build in 14 days' buildings.

angersock• 14 years ago

Come now, we all know that "fail fast" is a valid design philosophy in architecture. :P

Dirlewanger2• 14 years ago

>I wouldn't want to live or work in one of those Chinese 'build in 14 days' buildings.

Oh, neither would I. When I say they're rapidly approaching us, I mean they are fast acquiring the means/funding to do so, but not in the sense that everything they make is safe/ethical through a Western society's lenses. This is the lack of oversight I'm talking about and is one of the tenets that sets us apart from the BRIC countries and other developing ones.

georgefox• 14 years ago

Coming from the United States, I find the idea of a country with "rapid trains" pretty darn sophisticated.

mikeash• 14 years ago

That doesn't mean they don't have the necessary technology. I'm pretty sure they do. It means they didn't feel like spending the money to use it, which is a completely different thing.

photorized3• 14 years ago

Re: "they are rapidly approaching the West's level of technological sophistication"

I would disagree with that assessment. Simple electronics aside, they are severely lacking in technology. For example - they spent several decades of R&D on a jet engine, and haven't been able to design/build (or even copy) one that would work. And that's despite all the technological knowledge they borrowed from the Russians.

Disclaimer: former Jet Engine major from Russia, saw much knowledge sharing with China

eitland2• 14 years ago

Does this mean the reports[1] about the Chinese stealt fighter are hoaxes or that they are buying their engines elsewhere?

[1] http://duckduckgo.com/?q=chinese+stealth+fighter

Detrus• 14 years ago

Compared to millions of US kids being medicated for ADD with Ritalin, which can leave permanent marks like stunted growth. Or millions taking anti-depressants which also leave permanent marks, especially with prolonged use.

All these treatments have side effects and benefits so lets not blow China's lack of ethics out of proportion in this case. Prescriptions for drugs that permanently alter the brain are handed out with criminal carelessness in the US.

michaelfeathers• 14 years ago

I read the whole article expecting to find some report of patient opinions post-surgery but it wasn't there.

jonathanwallace• 14 years ago

This is exactly what I was looking for too. I'm disappointed not to find it.

alxndr• 14 years ago

"Within five years, 53% had relapsed and were addicted again to opiates, leaving 47% drug free.

"Conventional treatment only results in significant recovery in about 30-40% of cases, so the procedure apparently improves on that, but experts do not believe that such a small increase in benefit is worth the tremendous risk the surgery poses."

praxeologist2• 14 years ago

Since FDA-approved treatments for nicotine addiction can't crack 10% in real studies, this 30-40% number seems quite dubious. Faulty studies for nicotine give similarly high percentages.

betterunix4• 14 years ago

Not all treatments are medical. Substance abuse is a behavioral problem, and approaches based on clinical psychology have been remarkably successful.

vegas• 14 years ago

What could possibly go wrong?

debacle• 14 years ago

It seems like the surgery is only marginally more effective than conventional methods, and has drastic side effects.

The only scientists interested in this procedure seem to be sating a morbid curiosity rather than trying to cure addiction.

achille• 14 years ago

Some more insightful discussion on reddit.com/r/neuro/15jlxg

... read the abstract of this a while back, and it was bilateral ablation of the nucleus accumbens, if memory serves. The nucleus accumbens, of course, is not the "pleasure center" by any definition. It does not exclusively deal with pleasure, and pleasure is not only the product of the nucleus accumbens. As I'm sure many will know, the nucleus accumbens deals with lots of processes such as motivation, reward and both "positive" and "negative" emotion. It is pretty brutal, of course, and naturally this article was primarily concerned with the ethics of the procedure...

lifebar2• 14 years ago

In comment section someone suggested using that on sex offenders... Nice, get wrongly accused of rape (might not happen where you live, but where I live it's common way to get money from a man) and be lobotomised. Some other commenter suggests to find anger spot in brain and fix that... I suggest beter surgery- lets behead every morron suggesting such crap.

betterunix4• 14 years ago

There are already proposals to castrate (chemically or even surgically) sex offenders. It was not all that long ago that lobotomy was common practice, and it was applied to prisoners.

lifebar2• 14 years ago

Yes, and I hopped that we grew out of "lets do unfixable damage to everyone we don't like" age. And about castration - it might end up common practice, after all radical feminists are pushing for castration of men (and their extermination), feminism keeps fud that all women will be raped...

I would honestly take capital punishment rather than live lobotomised or castrated.

foxhop• 14 years ago

sounds like the methods used in a clockwork orange

photorized3• 14 years ago

I thought Clockwork Orange worked by forcefully building strong negative associations

icegreentea• 14 years ago

There is no information on how patients were selected for this treatment, which does weigh in on the ethics and possibly the technical merits (assume the numbers aren't fudged) of even studying this.

If the patient pool was drawn from consistent relapsers who failed to respond to conventional treatment, then this could be significant.

If they just applied this procedure nilly-willy on first timers... then yeah, this is pretty bad.

We can draw -some- parallels with various procedures designed to fight obesity. Obviously screwing around with the brain is on a whole different level from screwing around with your GI tract, but the purpose is the same - to physically change your body to change your urges.

In fact, given the research raising the probability that the nervous system supporting the GI tract has non-trivial effects on our mental states, the two types of procedures may be closer than expected - though once again, obviously acting on completely different degrees on magnitude in respect to effect on your mind/being.

idm• 14 years ago

Neuromancer; the drug-addicted protagonist had been the unwilling recipient of surgery like this (if memory serves).

PotatoEngineer• 14 years ago

And his solution was simply to find different drugs. Considering there's a 53% failure rate for this surgery, the results sound similar.

gee_totes• 14 years ago

Since we're talking about treatments for addiction, I'd like to give a shout-out to ibogaine[0], a psychoactive substance.

Apparently after a successful treatment with ibogaine, it's like an "addiction switch" has been turned off in your brain. I was interested to read this article hoping there would be more about the "addiction switch", which I find a fascinating concept.

Instead, maybe with this treatment, the switch simply gets burned away...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine#Treatment_for_opioid_a...

jacoblyles• 14 years ago

Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) are also being studied as a non-invasive treatment for OCD and addiction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#Medical_research

antihero• 14 years ago

Thing is, the real issues with addiction are due to social factors - being homeless, depressed and miserable.

Controversial Surgery for Addiction Burns Away Part of the Brain

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