If your interested in deep brain stimulation this article by Felice J. Freyer, a Journal Medical Writer at Rhode Island news is a very informative read: OCD makes him a prisoner of his thoughts
Mario Della Grotta lay awake on the operating table as doctors drilled two half-inch holes in his skull. He could hear the drill’s whine, feel its vibrations in the bone. But he sensed nothing when they took the crucial step: sliding a pair of wires deep into the white folds of his brain.
The surgery is conducted by neurosurgeon Gerhard M. Friehs, Rhode Island Hospital, and Butler Hospital psychiatrists Benjamin D. Greenberg and Steven A. Rasmussen, all researchers connected with Brown Medical School.
OCD is thought to spring from a malfunction in neurological circuitry that can be seen on MRI images: when a person with OCD engages in obsessive thoughts, certain areas of the brain light up more than they would in a normal person, a sign of heightened activity. The disorder may be an exaggeration of normal behaviors that enhance survival, behaviors that evolution hard-wired into the human brain — watching for predators, checking to make sure the fire is out, protecting children, avoiding disease. But with OCD something goes awry in the brain pathways that control these functions. The alarm signals of fear (“Make sure the door is locked!”) can’t be quieted by assurances from the rational brain (“I checked. The door is locked.”). So the OCD sufferer, even though he knows he locked the door, still feels that something is wrong, that he must keep checking.
The critics:
Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a research psychiatrist at the University of California at Los Angeles, who wrote the book Brain Lock, a popular guide to overcoming OCD, calls deep brain stimulation “essentially nothing more than an electrical prefrontal lobotomy. It’s less crude than just sticking an ice pick in there.” The label “deep brain stimulation,” in Schwartz’s view, is a marketing euphemism that makes an invasive surgical procedure sound like “a massage of your brain.”
Source: OCD makes him a prisoner of his thoughts Rhode Island news, 18 december 2006.
Tags: brown medical school, deep brain stimulation, jeffrey m schwartz, mri images, OCD, prefrontal lobotomy, research psychiatrist
