"Lobotomy" is actually a fairly common treatment for the most severe forms of epilepsy. For example hemispherectomy consists of severing one half of the brain from the brainstem. It's genuinely quite effective, and more than half of the people who get it will no longer have seizures. Most are still able to walk, talk, read, etc, and it's usually a marked improvement in quality of life over what they had before. Short of that, though, there are also neurosurgical procedures (such as subpial transections) that target specific parts of the brain. I guess the argument is, where you draw the line precisely, because there is some overlap. Lobotomy is about destroying a part of the brain, and in the beginning they would target healthy tissue, while these modern procedures are more about simply severing unhealthy sections. Lobotomy was also primarily about saving money by turning violent patients into docile vegetables, while the modern version actually is about fixing problems (by poking around in the brain).
Not really a lobotomy though, is it? You're not cutting either
lobe of the brain, not quite satisfying the
lobo- part of lobotomy. Lobectomies (-ectomy meaning removal, -tomy meaning cut) are still performed somewhat regularly, though they're only for physical injuries/cancer AFAIK
Corpus callusotomies are crazy though, they don't sound like real medicine, but they clearly work based on actual quantifiable data on the number and severity of seizures. Since it's performed by real doctors to treat a real problem we are able to objectively measure and compare the effects of the surgery, proving the value of something that otherwise sounds like pure quackery. Something that gender affirming care simply can't ever do.
To be fair, one of the doctors responsible for some early amhole surgery went on to performing other fun human experiments for the Nazis (blanking on his name rn).
Also, I would advise those people who share these misinformation tweets to read up on it, this place was not a bastion for gay and trans rights and even their hero Magnus Hirschfeld had crazy theories about homosexuality and thought it's something that can be cured.
Erwin Gohrbandt. Also Kurt Warnekros, though he didn't become a camp surgeon like his esteemed colleague, just performing involuntary sterilizations. The only one of the early armhole surgeons who didn't join the Nazis was Ludwig Levy-Lenz who I think would have if only he hadn't been Jewish and forced to flee the country.
I have a friend who is a psychiatrist and he administers ECT. He swears that if he was suffering from the kind of protracted, severe, life-threatening depression that they use ECT for, he wouldn't hesitate to have it himself. As with most modalities, it doesn't work for everybody, but for some people it works when nothing else will.
Pretty sure he told me all of his patients were voluntary. Many had had previous ECT treatment episodes.
I had a friend who was going down the troon path. Then he got ECT for seizures and almost immediately stopped wearing dresses and taking hormones (still hasn't fully detransitioned, but it definitely helped). This is purely anecdotal, obviously, and doesn't prove anything, but I thought it was interesting to see it in person.
I don't think that ECT
directly cured his "gender dysphoria", I think it helped alleviate his depression which he mistook for gender dysphoria. However, even if ECT was proven to 100% cure GD, there is
no way that it would be accepted socially for a long,
long time. Too much stigma associated with treating GD in general and with ECT in particular.
Some same reactions. Don't you love how everything is life and death to your average redditor? Absolutely insufferable bunch:
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Uk is doing what they did to alan turing to trans kids now.
Alan Turing was an adult put
on hormones to avoid prison. This is kids not getting their hormones paid for by state healthcare. It's literally the exact opposite.
This is glib, but it touches on something I've been thinking of a lot, which is the phenomology of disease and diagnosis. An old friend of mine from uni has recently been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and watching her entire personality turn into advocacy for it on social media has been.... interesting. She is quite clearly recontextualizing her own experience of her life with this diagnosis in mind, so that being a chronic weed smoker is now evidence of her suffering. It made me dig into the condition more, though I think most here would be aware that fibromyalgia is controversial, because despite the pain experiences by sufferers, there's no apparent abnormalities in the tissues of the pain points, often the joints. It's very much a diagnosis in the gaps, with symptoms and a lack of other explanations being the essential criteria.
This is a well-known phenomenon, usually applying more to mental illness. The same mental illnesses can have very different manifestations depending on the culture. For example, schizophrenia in industrial vs post-industrial cultures. It's known as a "symptom pool" I think. There's a book (which I haven't read) called "Crazy Like Us" about how American versions of mental illness have spread to non-American cultures.