Posted by bleauberry on January 28, 2009, at 18:41:34
In reply to ECT for anxiety and personality disorders, posted by mav27 on January 28, 2009, at 13:53:24
ECT is not effective for anything, except in skewed literature and in the minds of psychiatrists. Sometimes I wonder if some of them aren't more insane than we are. Relapse rates are extraordinarily high when it is effective.
Some people have done very well with ECT but require periodic returns to the zapper, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly. Those success stories are very hard to find though. Failures and disappointments outnumber them in the real world. Also deserving of comment is the under-rated damage to memory and cognitive function. It can be very serious, long lasting, or permanent, and often is.
Did the person have a DMSA provocation test for heavy metals? Did the person have a Western Blot from one of the two labs that test all the markers of Lyme and not just the limited markers of Lyme from the FDA tests? Were they tested for Lyme's co-infectors? Has the person's serum B vitamin status been checked? Has their methylation status been checked? Has their serum copper been tested? Has their daily cortisol curve been plotted? Has their TSH, free T3, free T4, and Hashimotos antibodies been checked, and are they all tightly within optimal range versus grossly within normal range?
If someone hasn't had a doctor thorough enough to do all these things, they have no place laying on a table to be knocked out by a barbituate and electrified straight to the brain serious enough to send the entire body into convulsions all the way down to a twitching big toe. Insane.
Sorry, my opinion of today's medical profession is obviously jaded and there is some frustration. Almost always they go for totally mysterious risky treatments where they have no idea if it will work or how it works, basically going for big guns and tanks while blindfolded when they pull the trigger, and yet never looking at the simple obvious easy logical stuff that is not mysterious and is right in front of them.
Insane.
Can you tell I am an ECT survivor? Can you tell I've seem dozens of people with serious psychiatric conditions reach symptom resolvement with proper treatment that did not involve psychiatric meds? The whole field of psychiatry is scary because they jump right straight to symptomatic treatment, which is not the same as curative treatment, without even considering what the disease is causing the symptoms. If one cannot find a disease from the list above, and dozens of combinations and permutations of meds haven't worked, then fine, try ECT if one must. Just don't put any more hope into it than any other previous treatment.
Don't get me wrong. I am a longtime psych med veteran and will probably be on one or another for life. People should continue to try to find the combinations that improve their lives. All I'm saying is ECT is not one of them. In addition to symptomatic treatment, people should test the obvious things but hardly ever do. Those can and do lead to pure remission that leaves them as they were pre-disease and without any meds.
poster:bleauberry
thread:876797
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090104/msgs/876875.html