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medical examiner: Health and medicine explained.
The Body Electric's New Look
Why shock therapy deserves its mini-revival.
By Barron H. Lerner
Posted Thursday, Jan. 3, 2008, at 7:38 AM ET
The history of electric shock therapy would seem to lend itself to a rather straightforward tale of last-ditch, gruesome treatment of mental illness. After all, we've all seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
But in their new book Shock Therapy, Edward Shorter and David Healy say this version is almost entirely inaccurate. Shorter is a historian who has written extensively on psychiatry, and Healy is a psychiatrist who has been highly critical of the marketing of psychopharmacological drugs. They believe that electroconvulsive therapy is incredibly effective. And yet for decades, a severely depressed patient—even one on the brink of suicide—might not have been offered the therapy, or if her doctors had proposed it, she or her family might well have declined it. In explaining why, the authors demonstrate that though we may assume medical treatments get adopted or rejected based on objective statistics, in fact data are often misinterpreted and manipulated by outside influences that end up overpowering them.
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medical examiner: Health and medicine explained.
The Body Electric's New Look
Why shock therapy deserves its mini-revival.
By Barron H. Lerner
Posted Thursday, Jan. 3, 2008, at 7:38 AM ET
The history of electric shock therapy would seem to lend itself to a rather straightforward tale of last-ditch, gruesome treatment of mental illness. After all, we've all seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
But in their new book Shock Therapy, Edward Shorter and David Healy say this version is almost entirely inaccurate. Shorter is a historian who has written extensively on psychiatry, and Healy is a psychiatrist who has been highly critical of the marketing of psychopharmacological drugs. They believe that electroconvulsive therapy is incredibly effective. And yet for decades, a severely depressed patient—even one on the brink of suicide—might not have been offered the therapy, or if her doctors had proposed it, she or her family might well have declined it. In explaining why, the authors demonstrate that though we may assume medical treatments get adopted or rejected based on objective statistics, in fact data are often misinterpreted and manipulated by outside influences that end up overpowering them.
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