Now I Understand Where Red Sox Fans Come From!
“Survivor Recounts Lobotomy at Age 12″
A 56-year old man underwent a transorbital or “ice pick” lobotomy as a boy in the early 60’s after being diagnosed as “schizophrenic” by Dr. Walter J. Freeman, the neurologist who “brought the lobotomy to the United States, first performing it in 1936.”
Brought the lobotomy to the United States? Is this an example of finding a market for your product whether customers need it or not? “According to medical records, Freeman diagnosed [the patient] as a schizophrenic - a diagnosis that would not have held today,” his current doctors say.
Oh, great - let’s all go out and hire a sales staff to push a new procedure on the unsuspecting public!
Over the years, lobotomies were done on about 40,000 to 50,000 people in the United States in mental institutions and hospitals. About 10,000 of those procedures were transorbital or “ice pick” lobotomies.” (Yes, your mental image is correct - the doc jams an ice pick above the eye through the orbit and into the frontal lobe of the brain).
By the way, it’s a good thing physicians changed to medical, not surgical treatment of psychiatric illness in the 1960s, or most of my 6th grade class would have ended up as extras in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“According to estimates in Freeman’s records, about a third of the lobotomies were considered successful…but the majority of patients did not do well - some died, many were paralyzed and in the cases in which patients were well enough to leave the hospital after the procedure, many were left childlike and devoid of personality.”
I suppose if I was a cynic I would remark that lobotomies and cancer chemotherapy share some characteristics, namely that they can have low response rates and are fraught with the possibility of disability or death. The difference is that the damage from chemotherapy can be avoided by choosing less risky treatments such as hormone therapy or targeted therapy, or proceeding with an alternative treatment such as surgery or radiation therapy. Also, research continues in every country on Earth in an attempt to find and develop improvements in anti-cancer therapy, whereas I am not certain that anyone was able to refine the delicate particulars of the “ice pick” lobotomy.
Oh, and one last contrast between the two therapies- no matter how sick one gets from their chemotherapy, with today’s modern supportive care the odds are overwhelming that one will recover. Unless Dr. Victor Frankenstein is still in practice, I don’t believe one can send a lobotomy back to the store for a refund.
