Trust Me, I'm a Doctor!

So for today, we are going to talk about lobotomies, I’m sure pretty much everyone has heard about lobotomies, and even some of you might be able to tell someone what a lobotomy is. For those of you who don’t, a lobotomy is a surgical disconnection of the prefrontal cortex to the brain, when the doctors performed this surgery, they’d damage the prefrontal cortex or cut of its connections from the rest of the brain. First a little history on lobotomies, they were first officially introduced into the world by Antonio Egas Moniz in 1935, at that time they were called leucotomy. The process of performing lobotomies was created with good intentions, doctors noticed that when laboratory primates had damage done to their prefrontal cortex, they became tamer without having impaired coordination or sensations. So doctors thought, if it worked on a monkey, it should work on a human. So they started off by preforming these lobotomies on people with severe psychological disorders, people who at the time didn’t have much in the way of treatment for what was wrong with them.  Then as the process of doing a lobotomy grew more notice and doctors/physicians started doing it more often, lobotomies started being used for other, less severe disorders, like depression and by the late 1940’s and early 1950’s about 40,000 surgeries were performed. One doctor who gained much recognition in performing these procedures was Walter Freeman, who created the transorbital lobotomy. For a lobotomy to work, holes would have to be drilled into a patients scalp in an operating room by trained neurosurgeons, but Freeman felt that these types of surgeries couldn’t be performed on the people who needed them most, people in state mental hospitals, where there were no operating rooms, surgeons or anesthesia. So he came up with a new method were, instead of drilling holes in the scalp, they would approach the frontal lobe through the eyes. So the new “transorbital” lobotomy was born, where the surgeons would take a thing surgical instrument and place it under the eyelid and against the top of the eye socket, and then with a mallet they would drive the instrument into the brain to severe the connections (its all much more technical than this).  Common consequences of this surgery were, apathy, a loss of the ability to plan and take initiative, memory disorders, distractibility, and a loss of emotional expressions. They also lost their social inhibitions and ignored the rules of polite civilized conduct. So tell me what you think, do you think the idea of lobotomies was a good thing? Why not?

 P.S I saw a video once about this hospital where lobotomies where performed, and one lady talked about her experience getting one, and how after the surgery happened she forgot, I believe half her life.

 

(A little video on Walter Freeman, a well known "Lobotomist")

We Are All on Drugs

So now we’re gonna talk about one of my favorite subjects, drugs. I enjoy learning about all the types of drugs that are out there, and their effects on a person, I enjoy learning how they came about, how they were introduced into society, etc., this is one subject I could read about for hours. Now most people don’t know this but most drugs out there were introduced into society with good intentions, a lot of them were used for medicinal purposes, until people enjoyed the effects these drugs gave them a little too much and they started to abuse them. People started abusing the drugs because our brain already created the chemicals that get increased when these drugs are taken, and as those chemicals are increased, or decreased in some cases, people enjoyed the effects they caused. Heroin was synthesized from morphine which was created to ease the pain of injured people. The first coca-colas that were created had cocaine in them and they were advertised as a sort of medicine. But those aren’t the drugs that we’re gonna talk about today, today we’re gonna talk about one drug that is well known to everyone, the one drug most people can say they’ve experimented with, the drug that some consider as the gateway drug to other harder drugs, that’s right Marijuana. The technical name for marijuana is Cannabis, but it is known by many other names. Marijuana’s history wasn’t so bad when it was first introduced, it wasn’t considered bad, nobody cared if you smoked it, grew it, whatever, it was widely known when someone did marijuana.  Then it got a bad reputation, people started saying it was a bad drug and it should be considered illegal, they said that marijuana turned Mexicans into super humans, and that was why it should be considered illegal. The war on drugs started and although chemically it wasn’t considered as bad as the other harder drugs, it was placed on the lists of illegal drugs and anyone who had it was arrested and placed in jail. Only just recently has it been made legal in certain states, but on a Federal level it is still considered illegal. Now this post isn’t an endorsement for marijuana, I don’t care either way whether it’s made legal or not, I just think that it’s stupid (excuse my language) that our jails are overcrowded because some people didn’t like that people of a Mexican descent where smoking this drug. That’s all for today, before I go into full rant mode and exceed my word count.

P.S A little fun fact for you: The father of our country, George Washington, grew marijuana in his back yard.

(This video shows more information on marijuana, it's history and the war on drugs. Its a little fast)

Blood-Brain Barrier (Why can't I come up with wittier titles?)

So Today’s post is going to be a science lesson, (so if science isn’t your thing I’d hit the back button know and instead go to YouTube to watch music videos and end up watching a bear riding a tiny tricycle). So today were going to talk about something called the blood-brain barrier, what is a blood-brain barrier you ask? (Excellent question lonely person reading this blog). The blood-brain barrier is a mechanism in the brain that keeps chemicals from crossing from the blood into the brain. So why do we need this blood-brain barrier, what does it do for us? To make a long story short, when a virus enters our body, the cell it infects send out a sort of bat signal to the immune system letting it know it’s been invaded and sacrificing its self for the good of the body. That might work for a regular old cell in the body because they can be easily replaced, but that doesn’t work in the brain because neurons can’t be replaced. (Oh no who will save us from these evil viruses? Don’t worry brain, I the blood-brain barrier am here to save you! My hero). So to protect the brain from harmful chemicals, viruses, bacteria, a wall was built along the brain’s blood vessels (and thus the blood-brain barrier was born).  Wait a minute, how does the barrier work? The barrier counts on the endothelial cells that form in the capillaries because they’re joined so tightly that nothing gets through them. This blood-brain barrier sounds like such a great idea, so why don’t we have this everywhere else? Why, because although it does a great job of keeping out harmful chemicals it also keeps out good, useful chemicals. Because of this the blood-brain barrier needs to use special mechanisms to get these useful chemicals to the brain. So although the blood-brain barrier is necessary to keep the brain in good working order, it does prove to be a disadvantage in getting helpful chemicals into the brain. So that’s all for today, join us next time where we’ll have something else exciting to talk about.

Here's a video that will probably explain it a little better, with pictures and stuff, and talk more about the disadvantages it causes.