OT? PBS doc on history of lobotomy, Monday 1/23- article

[Guest guest]

Like I mentioned last week, up to December, 2006 at least, the NIMH

site on autism listed investigations into " psychosurgery " (ice-pick

lobotomy by any other name...) as a prospective " treatment " for

autism. I believe this reference has been removed from the current

version of the site, when recommendations for Zyprexa were exchanged

for Risperdal. Point being, removing the reference doesn't mean it's

not still being investigated.

VERACARE <veracare@...> wrote: From: " VERACARE "

<veracare@...>

" Infomail1ahrp (DOT) org " <Infomail1@...>

Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:43:36 -0500

CC:

Subject: PBS: The Lobotomist_The Damage When Medicine Goes Awry_Jan.

21

ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION Promoting Openness, Full

Disclosure and Accountability

http://www.ahrp.org and

http://ahrp.blogspot.com

FYI

On Monday, Jan. 21, at 9:00 PM, Public Broadcasting stations will be

airing The LOBOTOMIST, a riveting documentary on the American

experience based on the 2005 biography of Walter Freeman, who

performed ice pick lobotomies on more than 2,900 people, the last

lobotomy in 1967.

The Washington Post reports (below) that hour-long " American

Experience " documentary " The Lobotomist " makes clear that Freeman's

operation reflected the neurologist's peculiar combination of

zealotry, talent, hubris and, as one of his trainees noted,

craziness. Sometimes Freeman, who relished putting on a show, used a

carpenter's mallet instead of a surgical hammer during demonstrations

of his operation. At other times, he would operate left-handed rather

than right-handed.

The same can be said about the proponents of ElectroShock, and

psychiatry's other brain damaging somatic interventions, including:

Magnetic Seizure Therapy (MST), Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

(TMS) Vagus Nerve Stimulation (TMS), Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS).

None of these invasive interventions is supported by scientific

evidence of safety or lasting efficacy.

Psychiatry's increasingly toxic pharmacologic treatments also lack

scientific evidence of safety and efficacy to justify their wide use;

yet they have become industry's blockbuster profit-makers thanks to

aggressive marketing and a complicit FDA.

Most disturbing is that each of these brain damaging experimental

treatments became fashionable due to the propaganda spread by its

coterie of zealous proponents whose hubris, positions of authority

and financial stakes, led to their acceptance. FDA officials abdicate

the agency's mission by turning a blind eye and deaf ear to

fraudulent promotional claims refuted by the scientific data buried

within FDA's files.

Those who expose their patients to harm-producing interventions

violate the Hippocratic Oath-- " First, do no harm. "

In the absence of scientifically valid evidence-based medicine; in the

absence of mandatory monitoring and reporting of drug and/or device

adverse

effects, to determine safety--it is better to do nothing.

Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav

veracare@...

212-595-8974

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011401

484.html

THE WASHINGTON POST

'Lobotomist' Serves as a Warning

Documentary Shows Damage Done When Medicine Goes Awry

By G. Boodman

Tuesday, January 15, 2008; Page HE01

One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was

carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical

establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital

or " ice

pick " lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling operation

performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the 1930s and

1960s

was touted as a cure for mental illness.

Walter J. Freeman performs a lobotomy in 1949. The surgery aimed to

cure

mental illness.

This Story

* 'Lobotomist' Serves as a Warning

58.html>

* 'I Wasn't Sick or Crazy. I Was Simply Impossible to Control.'

1481.html>

* 'The Lobotomist'

89.html>

Its prosaic name comes from the instrument initially used to perform

it: an

ice pick plucked from the kitchen drawer of the procedure's tireless

proselytizer, Walter J. Freeman, who pioneered the operation in 1936

while

at Washington University Hospital.

The story of how Freeman sold his procedure to credulous colleagues,

assiduously courted the press and convinced desperate families that

sticking

an ice pick through a patient's upper eye sockets and twirling it

like a

swizzle stick through brain matter would cure psychosis, depression or

troublesome behavior is the ultimate in cautionary medical tales.

As the riveting hour-long " American Experience " documentary " The

Lobotomist "

(scheduled to air Jan. 21 at 9 p.m. on WETA and other PBS stations)

makes

clear, Freeman's operation reflected the neurologist's peculiar

combination

of zealotry, talent, hubris and, as one of his trainees noted,

craziness.

Sometimes Freeman, who relished putting on a show, used a carpenter's

mallet

instead of a surgical hammer during demonstrations of his operation.

At

other times, he would operate left-handed rather than right-handed.

Based in part on the much-praised 2005 biography " The Lobotomist " by

medical

writer Jack El-Hai, who appears in the film and served as a

consultant, the

film by Barak Goodman and Maggio features chilling black-and-

white home

movies as well as haunting photographs of patients before and

sometimes

after their lobotomies. Many of the movies are narrated by a gravel-

voiced

Freeman demonstrating the procedure he performed on more than 2,900

people,

the youngest of whom was 4.

As the filmmakers note, lobotomy flourished in a therapeutic vacuum:

Until

the mid-1950s when the groundbreaking tranquilizer Thorazine swept

through

mental hospitals, ushering in the era of psychopharmacology, medicine

had

virtually nothing to offer psychiatric patients.

State hospitals were teeming, squalid warehouses that had become

permanent

homes to thousands who had little hope of ever leaving. One of the

most

notorious was Washington's St. s Hospital, where Freeman

began his

career in the 1920s and was struck by the sight of 5,000

patients " whose

lives were going nowhere, would go nowhere, " in the words of El-Hai.

The solution, Freeman believed, lay in a radical experimental

procedure

invented by a Portuguese neurologist who in 1949 would win the Nobel

Prize

in medicine. He claimed the drastic brain operation had cured a

substantial

number of people with mental illness.

The scion of a distinguished Philadelphia medical family who had a

burning

desire for fame, Freeman began experimenting and developed the ice

pick

procedure. His operation severed the frontal lobe from the thalamus,

the

repository of emotions and the site where Freeman believed mental

illness

originated.

A few patients and their families claimed lobotomy was beneficial,

especially in reducing agitation, which was Freeman's measure of

success.

But others died on the table or were left irreparably damaged:

childlike,

docile, vacant and incontinent. Among them was Rosemary Kennedy, the

23-year-old mildly retarded sister of F. Kennedy, who spent 56

years of

her life in an institution after Freeman operated on her in 1941.

Undaunted by his failures, Freeman's pitch that lobotomy cured mental

illness was seized on by the press -- the Washington Star called it

among

" the greatest innovations of this generation, " and the New York Times

pronounced it " history-making. " Many doctors embraced it as a 10-

minute

operation that promised to empty mental hospitals and return patients

to

their families. Opponents, mostly psychiatrists who practiced

Freudian talk

therapy, didn't matter much: In those days public criticism of a

doctor by

his peers was regarded as unethical.

By the early 1960s lobotomy had fallen out of favor, in part because

of its

low success rate and the disastrous harm it inflicted on many

patients.

Freeman, who died in 1972, performed his last lobotomy in 1967; his

privileges at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley, Calif., were revoked

after the

patient died.

While several of his relatives appear on camera, one of the most

affecting

interviews is with Berkeley bus driver Dully, who was

lobotomized by

Freeman at age 12 after his stepmother complained he was difficult.

The issue at the heart of this powerful and unsettling film is not,

as one

writer puts it, " how a man could go off the rails, but how science

could go

off the rails. "

It's a question well worth pondering. ¿

Comments:boodmans@... .

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