Medicine: Not So Shocking

• Share

Electric shock treatments have apparently been successful in treating some forms of insanity, but doctors are beginning to suspect that the "cure" may be worse than the disease. The treatment, a jolting shot of high-powered current through the brain, causes convulsions that may dislocate the patient's jaw, break his bones, or even kill him.

A group of leading U.S. psychiatrists, headed by Dr. William C. Menninger, has now issued a stern warning against "abuses" of electric shock therapy. The psychiatrists believe that shock treatments have become a fad and are being prescribed recklessly (and ineffectually) as a cure-all for too many different neuroses.

Last week two British doctors announced a discovery that may do more good than warnings: a milder electrical substitute for shock treatments. The new system, called electronarcosis (with which U.S. investigators have also experimented), does not produce convulsions, and has given "distinctly promising" results in treating schizophrenia.

Doctors do not know exactly how electrical therapy works. Shock treatment specialists have supposed that it takes a strong shock to jar a disordered mind out of its schizophrenic or manic depressive state. But Britain's Drs. A. Spencer Paterson and W. Liddell Milligan tried a new machine that feeds into the brain a weak electrical current automatically adjusted to the brain's resistance. Instead of shocking the brain, the current puts it in a coma. Like the shock treatment, the new electrical shot-in-the-brain momentarily stops the patient's heartbeat and breathing. But after a course of comparatively mild treatments under electronarcosis, he wakes up a changed man.

Drs. Paterson and Milligan hope the change is for the better. At any rate, they observe, it's safe.