Word: metrazol
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...serious psychoses, shock (electric, insulin or metrazol) is sometimes effectively used to jolt depressed psychotics back to normal. Some psychiatrists admit that electric shock superficially resembles the medieval torture of the insane. (The beatings that the insane used to get, with chains, whips or rods, may actually have helped them, no matter what the intent.) The modern version is applied with more humanity, no more understanding of what makes it work. But patients who are so sick that they cannot talk at all may be able to talk after shock. Psychiatrists try to use such brief lucid periods to start...
They Mystify. The Commission made no report on metrazol and electric shock treatment, because they are too new to permit thorough follow-up studies. Both have the advantage that they take less time per treatment than insulin shock (electric shock is the cheapest type) and do not require watching a patient's every breath for hours - insulin shock patients may go into irreversible shock and fatal convulsions. Both metrazol and electric shock have the disadvantage that the "fits" they produce are violent and may cause a patient to hurt himself. As many as half the metrazol patients used...
...Richard C. Gill brought back a big supply of curare from the jungles, hoping it would help spastic paralysis (TIME, July 22, 1940). It was not much help, because its effects are transient. But doctors soon began to use curare to pre vent bone breaking in metrazol shock treatments for insanity...
...over 10,000 convulsions have been given to patients abroad and in the U.S. The proportion of improvement depends upon the type and length of illness, is about the same as for insulin and metrazol-estimates range roughly from IS to 50%. But of course psychiatrists do not yet know how permanent any shock treatment is over a period of years...
Although electric shock may not replace the standard insulin treatment, most psychiatrists think it far superior to metrazol. Its advantages: 1) the convulsions are not usually as violent as those produced by metrazol; 2) since patients lose consciousness immediately, they do not remember the frightening "aura" that precedes a metrazol convulsion; 3) electric treatment is much cheaper than insulin or metrazol-a machine costs less than $300. But electric shock is safe only in the hands of a trained psychiatrist...