Pain “Relief” by Frontal Cingulumotomy. Foltz & White, L. E. (1962).

Just came across this and had to share this with you all. Very old, but still, my eyes popped at the patient descriptions. Not to mention the "treatment".

Sort of in the category of "things could be worse"....

Its a description of the outcomes of several patients with "psychogenic pain" or organic pain "with a strong emotional or psychogenic component" who were treated with neurosurgery (a portion of their cingulum, a bundle of white matter fibres, was removed on one or both sides).

The only bright spot in all this - if you could call it that - is the lack of overt sexism.The male case above seems to have been treated with as much dripping contempt as the female one.

 

Had she continued to complain about pain, they would have cut out more of her brain. No wonder she was miraculously cured.

 

Yea. It also helped that the authors of the paper were also the surgeons.

I love how the guy was expected to have a total personality meltdown if he became separated from his pain - but miraculously, no meltdown happened! His "compensated personality" worked just fine!

 

Really sounds like they tortured her until she took the strategy of lying to get out of more torture. Or maybe they destroyed her brain so much it just removed the worst of the sensation. Cingulumotomy is a type of lobotomy.

I am continually amazed at how absurd this entire field of medicine is. You can't even parody it, it's so far beyond it. Barbaric with zero accountability.

 

I think it's also a question of stereotype. Hyper-sensitive people are perceived differently, even if they have the same internal mindset and stability as anyone else.

 

Sort of, it still involves the frontal lobes, but the tissue removed is different. The cingulum is a bundle of fibres that communicates between the anterior cingulate (involved in motivated, goal-directed action), and regions of the brain involved in memory and emotion. Cingulumotomy effectively disables input from the anterior cingulate.

The effect is basically a de-motivating one. Its been proposed recently that the experience of pain reflects activity in a network, one component (the insula) is involved in evaluating incoming bodily signals, and another (the anterior cingulate) is involved in evaluating how aversive they are and allocating effort to tackling them - which can include taking direct action or modifying the autonomic system response.

It has been suggested that when the anterior cingulate is disabled, the person experiences only the incoming signals, and less of the aversiveneess, because that part of the pain experience requires the anterior cingulate.

But these guys wouldn't have known any of this back then, they were just flying by the seat of their pants.

 

This is... horrifying!