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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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The 1949 Nobel Prize in medicine was given to the doctor who developed the lobotomy, and has never been rescinded.

Lobotomy is a legitimate therapeutic intervention and is still used daily all over the world to treat patients suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy.

I wonder if anybody has ever tried lobotomy to treat gender dysphoria. Considering the sort of procedures that medical experts seem to deem appropriate to treat it, it should not be a big deal to get it approved.

I would not be surprised if lobotomy could successfully treat gender dysphoria, the question is merely how big of a chunk of a brain you need to lob off to stop the condition.

Lobotomy is a legitimate therapeutic intervention and is still used daily all over the world to treat patients suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy.

Are you thinking of electroshock therapy?

No, the practice of surgically removing parts of the brain to treat disease.

For example It seems that now they call it lobectomy but it's essentially the same thing.

Surgery to treat psychiatric disorders is still being done but it is vastly different from a classical lobotomy. Brain surgery to treat psychological disorders is considered only after medicines given for a long time have not worked. The procedure is done by an expert neurosurgeon, often using tools like a microscope, gamma knife, and robotic surgery.

For one thing, epilepsy is NOT a psychiatric disorder, and surgery is not the first line of treatment for it. Considering seizures in themselves cause brain damage, and in the most extreme cases can be deadly, that is an extreme far cry from shoving a metal spike into your daughter's eye so you can make her tractable and retarded.

Yeah. I first learned about lobotomy when I was 12.

I decided that as far as I was concerned: if that was me, they might as well save the doctor's bill and finish the job with a 12-gauge instead.

Haven't changed my personal view on the procedure; if lobotomy instead replaced a troublesome child with a roughly-equally-capable child who was less troublesome and had an entirely different personality, my thoughts would be different.

IIRC it's done occasionally as an absolute last resort for refractory cases of schizophrenia in Europe. I don't really have a position on this; by the time you are so far gone that you're in the worst 0.1 percent of schizophrenics you're pretty far gone. You might be living on a Christmas tree farm, eating food from dumpsters and pine needles because you think they contain microchips that connect you to Lord Elon Musk. And you're covered in tick bites and you're starving. You fight anyone that tries to stop you like a wild animal, which has gotten you beat up, hospitalized, and sometimes jailed. Pretty much every psychotropic medication under the sun has been tried on you, but you're either a zombie on them or screaming to be let out and given access to pine needles almost 24/7.

There are no good solutions for this guy.

lobotomy : lobectomy :: phalloplasty : ?

Lobotomy is a legitimate therapeutic intervention and is still used daily all over the world to treat patients suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy.

No it isn't.