Word: clinicism
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...That's a point the University of Virginia's Greyson wanted to settle. Are NDErs up there on the ceiling or aren't they? In 2004, he began a study that he hoped would provide the answer. At the university's electrophysiology clinic, surgeons implant cardioverter-defibrillators in patients at high risk of sudden death. In the process, cardiac arrest is induced. Greyson arranged for a laptop computer, displaying a series of images, to be stationed near the ceiling, where only an elevated being could see the screen. As ingenious as it was, the investigation flopped. Greyson and his team...
None of this is the stuff of functioning adulthood, but all of it is huge for a person who was never supposed to manage anything like it again. And all of it is a result of the growing therapeutic science of deep-brain stimulation (DBS). Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic inserted a pair of fine wires into the mugging victim's brain last year, threading them down to the thalamus, a deep, intact structure that could, in theory, jump- start the surviving circuits in the damaged cerebral cortex above. Very low current was sent through the wires, stimulating the thalamus...
Using DBS in severely brain-damaged patients may be a brand-new breakthrough, but the technology has already proved itself as a treatment for the tremors of Parkinson's disease, is nearing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and is in clinical trials as a therapy for depression. Studies suggest it could also help control symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, dystonia--or paralytic muscle rigidity--epilepsy and even some addictions. "DBS is like a pacemaker for the brain," says Cleveland Clinic neurosurgeon Ali Rezai, who performed the operation on the brain-damaged man. "We pinpoint...
...Cleveland Clinic is one of 250 places in the U.S. that perform DBS for Parkinson's, and worldwide, close to 40,000 people have undergone the procedure. But the operation is by no means a cure. For one thing, it doesn't do much for end-stage Parkinson's symptoms like cripplingly bad posture and difficulty swallowing. More important, Parkinson's is a degenerative condition, which means that while DBS neutralizes tremors, the brain continues to deteriorate beneath the mask of the treatment. After a decade or so, electrical stimulation is not enough to contain the disease. Still, that...
...Lynn Shuster, director of the Women's Health Clinic at the Mayo Clinic, agrees that timing is crucial. The women in the WHI study were years out from menopause and probably already had significant hardening and narrowing of the arteries, says Shuster. It comes as no surprise, then, that taking an estrogen pill, which increases blood clots, would increase heart and brain events. "The problem is that the results of the WHI were extrapolated to say that older women shouldn't take estrogen. But the bigger issue probably depends on when a woman starts it, if it is going...