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Gamma Knife: a radical treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder patients (guardian.co.uk)
2 points by TriinT on Dec 16, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



"""These beams converged on a pinpoint-accurate spot where they created a lesion that damaged a tiny area of tissue, blocking the pathway that caused the OCD symptoms.

This is modern psychosurgery, a hi-tech, experimental, descendant of the now infamous frontal lobotomy"""

Accurately damaging a small, specific area which has been identified as causing a particular problem is a far cry from jabbing ice-picks through the eye sockets, scrambling the frontal lobe and claiming it's a treatment for anything from depression and hysteria to "being a bit of a twat".

Surely it's more a descendent of traditional scalpel neurosurgery? Still sounds a bit creepy, but there's no need to tar it with that kind of negative association, is there?




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