Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) For Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
It's Not Exactly Brain Surgery, other than being literal brain surgery.
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a daily health-themed newsletter. Today, I'm doing a little bit of an overview about a treatment modality that I don't provide.
There are two noble prizes in Psychiatry, for interventions. The first was awarded to Julius Wagner-Jauregg, M.D., in 1927 for the development of malaria therapy for the treatment of neurosyphilis, or “general paresis of the insane.”
Yes, we gave people malaria as a treatment for insanity. It turns out that syphilis is caused by the parasite Treponema palladium, dies at a temperature of 104°F, and malaria, another parasitic infection, creates waxing and waning fevers, that get up to 105°F. And so, if you're able to infect somebody who happens to have neurosyphilis, those spirochetes in the brain, with malaria, the temperature will get so high that it's a biological treatment that kills the bugs that was making individuals insane. In the early part of the 20th century, when Warner-Jauregg developed this treatment modality, it…