Comments: Researchers Report Breakthrough On Paralysis Using Electrical Stimulation
This reminds me -- just obliquely, you understand -- of some research I read about some time ago about a person who had been unconscious for a real long time waking up after being administered Paxil. I remember being rather horrified to be honest (given my biases against Paxil) and I don't know what happened next but it was in the papers a couple of years ago. Also wondered who had the idea of giving such a victim Paxil in the first place -- weird idea -- but apparently it worked in some way or other. As I say I don't know what happened next with the poor hapless soul.
Posted by Sara at October 15, 2008 02:30 PM
There are plenty electric activity in the brain as well as in the whole body.
I believe that there's a lot to be learned about it all. We are far from understanding it all. How chemistry interact with electricity... So much to learn!
There are neurotransmitters that are still not known.
Blaming dopamine and serotonin will be laughable somewhere in the future.
It already is. But some people keeps on repeating that:
"It's just like diabetes: chemical imbalance."
I just ask myself why people who suffers diabetes are not healed with insulin.
Posted by Ana at October 15, 2008 03:34 PM
I worked in rehab for a number of years. All of our "medical end point" paras and quads were told they would never walk again, there was no hope. For some reason a lot of them were quite depressed. Go figure.
Then Christopher Reeve opened doors and minds with his refusal to accept the party line. Now we see researchers actually doing research in this area.
The parallels between this seemingly hopeless endeavor--in which strides are being made, though not as quickly as any of us would like--and the "you will never get better" attitude of the mental health profession are unmistakable.
Posted by Sherry at October 16, 2008 04:52 AM
So could you retrain the brain, via some stimulus (electrical or otherwise), to think and feel differently? I don't really know.
That's what learning is, at its core. Interacting with stimuli that create physical changes in the brain.
Using that process to change mental health disorders is what therapy is based on. It's not always perfect or done competently, but that's what it's working toward: rewiring the brain.
There's a definite bias, I think, in that we think only of drugs or surgery when we think of "rewiring." But it happens every day, with every interaction and thought that we have.
Posted by occhiblu at October 19, 2008 09:49 PM
occhiblu or Herb?
Is this a paid advertisement for VNS? or an actual opinion?
Posted by stan at October 20, 2008 09:45 AM
Thankfully the hypocrites at PETA have gotten nowhere.
By the way when is the head of PTA going to stop using pig insulin?
Do I hate them?
They want doctors and scientists to be blown up or burned to death in their labs.
Without their work I die, so I take PETA to be a death threat directed at me, and my friends who are DRs and PHds.
Posted by da6 at October 25, 2008 02:03 PM