6 ms·

Controversial Surgery for Addiction Burns Away Part of the Brain

33 points by 4ad 14y ago

idm 14y ago
Neuromancer; the drug-addicted protagonist had been the unwilling recipient of surgery like this (if memory serves).
- PotatoEngineer 14y ago
  And his solution was simply to find different drugs. Considering there's a 53% failure rate for this surgery, the results sound similar.
Dirlewanger 14y 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.
- photorized 14y 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
  - eitland 14y 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 http://duckduckgo.com/?q=chinese+stealth+fighter
    - Gravityloss 14y ago
      Russian engine technology. The J-20 is a big prototype canard fighter that has some stealth features but we don't yet know how stealthy it is, but it doesn't look very. And there's very little information on the J-21/J-31 (naming unclear) but it looks like the JSF / F-22. It could perhaps be more stealthy.
    - photorized 14y ago
      Older Russian engine - AL-31 (АЛ-31Ф).
    - sarvinc 14y ago
      Not the same jet but another example http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2012/12/china-upset-at-being-called-ou.html http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2012/12/china-...
- revelation 14y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
  - eitland 14y 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..)
  - ibisum 14y ago
    Don't kid yourself, America is still performing brutal lobotomies.
  - merlincorey 14y ago
    > I guess one can learn how to create Aluminum Alchemy! Aluminium (aka aluminum) is a basic chemical element.
- zalew 14y 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 14y ago
    Come now, we all know that "fail fast" is a valid design philosophy in architecture. :P
    - zalew 14y ago
      "move fast and break things!"
  - Dirlewanger 14y 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.
    - zalew 14y ago
      Brasil and Russia both have various specific to their natures issues, but I wouldn't put them in one line with China trying too hard to become Jetsons overnight.
  - georgefox 14y ago
    Coming from the United States, I find the idea of a country with "rapid trains" pretty darn sophisticated.
- Detrus 14y 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 14y ago
I read the whole article expecting to find some report of patient opinions post-surgery but it wasn't there.
- jonathanwallace 14y ago
  This is exactly what I was looking for too. I'm disappointed not to find it.
alxndr 14y 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."
- praxeologist 14y 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.
  - betterunix 14y ago
    Not all treatments are medical. Substance abuse is a behavioral problem, and approaches based on clinical psychology have been remarkably successful.
    - praxeologist 14y ago
      What % is "remarkably successful" though? Maybe with current therapy for drug abuse we are fairly close to as good as we are ever going to get but I still doubt 30-40% of people who go into treatment stop using. People just don't change their behavior that easily. I work in tobacco so can only really speak about that but a quick google is showing similar single-digit success rates for drug treatment. I'm with Szasz that addiction is not a disease but this is not conventional wisdom. Obviously, drugs are not just given like how an antibiotic is, but drugs such as for related ailments like depression can be given for people in drug treatment AFAIK.
vegas 14y ago
What could possibly go wrong?
debacle 14y 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 14y 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...
lifebar 14y 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.
- betterunix 14y 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.
  - lifebar 14y 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.
    - king_jester 14y ago
      > 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... This is FUD, mandatory chemical or surgical castration for convicts is not a popular thing and isn't being pushed for legislatively or by most activist groups at this time. Feminism does not make a case for exterminating men, and anyone who suggests that men should be exterminated is an idiot. Also, 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, that is a very real problem, but please get your facts straight.
      - betterunix 14y ago
        "Also, 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime" That is a number that came from one study, from the 1980s, which was conducted by a feminist, and which includes attempted attacks. I am not saying that the problem of women being sexually assaulted should be ignored, but the 1-in-4 figure is the second highest to have been reported (1-in-3 is the highest; some studies have found less than 1-in-50) and was meant to be shocking. The experimental methodology used to find that number was based on the hypothesis that using words like "rape" would trigger a denial in the women be surveyed; thus the study asks questions that fit a broad definition of rape, and even the woman who created that survey later admitted that one of the questions about rape was ambiguous and could cover consensual sex. Don't just parrot numbers you read in feminists literature. Rape is a serious crime; don't diminish its significance or the extent of its harm by claiming that there are nearly a hundred million rape victims in America (which invites people to ask, "Why aren't all those victims in counseling? Is rape really a crime whose victims need counseling?").
foxhop 14y ago
sounds like the methods used in a clockwork orange
- photorized 14y ago
  I thought Clockwork Orange worked by forcefully building strong negative associations
icegreentea 14y 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.
ibisum 14y ago
What a barbaric and inhumane practice. This is no further progress for humanity than the rack of the Inquisition, the ice-pick to the brain. Are we really resorting to such torturous acts as a norm? What I find most disturbing about this issue is how people just blindly accept it .. as if it isn't torture and enslavement in some other form. My hope is that in 100 years, humanity looks back on such activities with pity and shame, as it should be. Just like we should be looking back on ECT and the ice-pick lobotomy, and their more modern chemical versions, with dismay right now. Seriously, human mutilation as a solution to State problems? No thanks - before this would ever become a norm, I would pick up a gun and fight until the State - or any other Organ - which supports such activities is driven back into the swamp, where it belongs and should never have been allowed to leave ..
mrbill 14y ago
Made me think of Spider Robinson's <a href="http://deathwish.net/arch/godisaniron.htm>God http://deathwish.net/arch/godisaniron.htm>God Is an Iron</a>.
gee_totes 14y 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_addiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine#Treatment_for_opioid_a...
- jacoblyles 14y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#Medical_research
antihero 14y ago
Thing is, the real issues with addiction are due to social factors - being homeless, depressed and miserable.

33 points by 4ad 14y ago

idm 14y ago

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

PotatoEngineer 14y ago
And his solution was simply to find different drugs. Considering there's a 53% failure rate for this surgery, the results sound similar.

Dirlewanger 14y 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.

photorized 14y 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
- eitland 14y 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 http://duckduckgo.com/?q=chinese+stealth+fighter
  - Gravityloss 14y ago
    Russian engine technology. The J-20 is a big prototype canard fighter that has some stealth features but we don't yet know how stealthy it is, but it doesn't look very. And there's very little information on the J-21/J-31 (naming unclear) but it looks like the JSF / F-22. It could perhaps be more stealthy.
  - photorized 14y ago
    Older Russian engine - AL-31 (АЛ-31Ф).
  - sarvinc 14y ago
    Not the same jet but another example http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2012/12/china-upset-at-being-called-ou.html http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2012/12/china-...
revelation 14y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
- eitland 14y 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..)
- ibisum 14y ago
  Don't kid yourself, America is still performing brutal lobotomies.
- merlincorey 14y ago
  > I guess one can learn how to create Aluminum Alchemy! Aluminium (aka aluminum) is a basic chemical element.
zalew 14y 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 14y ago
  Come now, we all know that "fail fast" is a valid design philosophy in architecture. :P
  - zalew 14y ago
    "move fast and break things!"
- Dirlewanger 14y 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.
  - zalew 14y ago
    Brasil and Russia both have various specific to their natures issues, but I wouldn't put them in one line with China trying too hard to become Jetsons overnight.
- georgefox 14y ago
  Coming from the United States, I find the idea of a country with "rapid trains" pretty darn sophisticated.
Detrus 14y 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 14y ago

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

jonathanwallace 14y ago
This is exactly what I was looking for too. I'm disappointed not to find it.

alxndr 14y 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."

praxeologist 14y 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.
- betterunix 14y ago
  Not all treatments are medical. Substance abuse is a behavioral problem, and approaches based on clinical psychology have been remarkably successful.
  - praxeologist 14y ago
    What % is "remarkably successful" though? Maybe with current therapy for drug abuse we are fairly close to as good as we are ever going to get but I still doubt 30-40% of people who go into treatment stop using. People just don't change their behavior that easily. I work in tobacco so can only really speak about that but a quick google is showing similar single-digit success rates for drug treatment. I'm with Szasz that addiction is not a disease but this is not conventional wisdom. Obviously, drugs are not just given like how an antibiotic is, but drugs such as for related ailments like depression can be given for people in drug treatment AFAIK.

vegas 14y ago

What could possibly go wrong?

debacle 14y 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 14y 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...

lifebar 14y 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.

betterunix 14y 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.
- lifebar 14y 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.
  - king_jester 14y ago
    > 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... This is FUD, mandatory chemical or surgical castration for convicts is not a popular thing and isn't being pushed for legislatively or by most activist groups at this time. Feminism does not make a case for exterminating men, and anyone who suggests that men should be exterminated is an idiot. Also, 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, that is a very real problem, but please get your facts straight.
    - betterunix 14y ago
      "Also, 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime" That is a number that came from one study, from the 1980s, which was conducted by a feminist, and which includes attempted attacks. I am not saying that the problem of women being sexually assaulted should be ignored, but the 1-in-4 figure is the second highest to have been reported (1-in-3 is the highest; some studies have found less than 1-in-50) and was meant to be shocking. The experimental methodology used to find that number was based on the hypothesis that using words like "rape" would trigger a denial in the women be surveyed; thus the study asks questions that fit a broad definition of rape, and even the woman who created that survey later admitted that one of the questions about rape was ambiguous and could cover consensual sex. Don't just parrot numbers you read in feminists literature. Rape is a serious crime; don't diminish its significance or the extent of its harm by claiming that there are nearly a hundred million rape victims in America (which invites people to ask, "Why aren't all those victims in counseling? Is rape really a crime whose victims need counseling?").

foxhop 14y ago

sounds like the methods used in a clockwork orange

photorized 14y ago
I thought Clockwork Orange worked by forcefully building strong negative associations

icegreentea 14y 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.

ibisum 14y ago

What a barbaric and inhumane practice. This is no further progress for humanity than the rack of the Inquisition, the ice-pick to the brain. Are we really resorting to such torturous acts as a norm? What I find most disturbing about this issue is how people just blindly accept it .. as if it isn't torture and enslavement in some other form. My hope is that in 100 years, humanity looks back on such activities with pity and shame, as it should be. Just like we should be looking back on ECT and the ice-pick lobotomy, and their more modern chemical versions, with dismay right now. Seriously, human mutilation as a solution to State problems? No thanks - before this would ever become a norm, I would pick up a gun and fight until the State - or any other Organ - which supports such activities is driven back into the swamp, where it belongs and should never have been allowed to leave ..

mrbill 14y ago

Made me think of Spider Robinson's <a href="http://deathwish.net/arch/godisaniron.htm>God http://deathwish.net/arch/godisaniron.htm>God Is an Iron</a>.

gee_totes 14y 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_addiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine#Treatment_for_opioid_a...

jacoblyles 14y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#Medical_research

antihero 14y ago

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