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Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Speaking of...

Kicking the habit. Yesterday when I was making sure that I hadn't been duped again by J and his friend Ty about the origins of 'cold turkey' and 'kick the habit' (I learned the hard way when they burst out laughing as I repeated the fun party fact they'd shared with me to a crowd of people that Carson Daily was a Navy SEAL in Desert Storm...or not), I found this interesting article from 2004 about a surgical procedure being performed in China that is reported to 'erase the memory' of drug use and it's enticement from the mind of chronic users. How do they do this, you may be asking yourself? Oh, they drill a hole in their head. No, they're not drilling into the patient's brain, but they drill a hole in the skull that's 1 cm in diameter. There was only one hospital in China performing the procedure to the tune of about $4,000 US dollars using an encephalic stabilizer that they'd imported from the US for $34.88 million.

I wasn't able to find any further information, or answers to the questions people posed in the comments, and the information is over 5 years old, so who knows if they even perform it anymore. At the time of the article's publication, there had been 18 surgeries carried out, with only one of the patient's relapsing. It is thought that the patient's relapse was due to social pressures after they reunited with their prior circle of friends.


I guess the research and development team on this one took the term 'I need it like I need a hole in my head' a little too literally, eh?

1 comment:

The Caffeinated Mommy said...

Wow. Let's hope you don't need to have a lobotomy while trying to wean C. from nursing. ;-)