Newsweek: “‘Josh’ says he was fully prepared when he amputated his left hand with a power tool. He says he had tried to cut it off before””once putting it underneath a truck and trying to crush it (the jack didn’t collapse right); once attempting to saw it off with a table saw (he lost his nerve).”
Related posts:
- About that amputated finger in Sicko
- Bipolar Disorder
- Medical identity theft
- Medical identity theft revisited
- From primary care physician to truck driver
- Whole body CT scans
- Removing a foreign body from the ear
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 4 comments }
So, what do you think of this, as a primary care physician??? One of the biggest hurdles people with BIID are facing is the lack of recognition and acceptance from GP’s and other medical professionals. You say “telling it like it is”, so, there, tell me, someone with BIID, why it is exactly that in the eyes of physicians, it is better to keep me in a mental and emotional hell than to do a spinal cord transection? Given that psychotherapy, psychiatry, cognitive-behavioural therapy and talk therapies don’t help. Various cocktails of (prescribed) medications don’t help. The only thing currently proven to work is surgery. So why do you guys keep refusing us the only solution there is? That’s what *I* would like to know from you, telling it how it is…
So we let nuts define their own illness and assign irrational treatment?
Cutting off a healthy limb because of odd thinking in the brain is pure quackery.
So some people have a limb that they don’t feel natural with? Maybe someday a way to remove that subjective discomfort will be found. Until then, it is important to remember that in the end, no matter how intrusive, it is just a subjective discomfort, while physical mutilation is permament and irreversible. Millions manage to live with the opposite problem–lifelong incongruency of missing a limb that their brain tells them should be their. They manage to muddle through. None of us are promised discomfort free lives.
One might chose to take offense at the term “nuts”, but I’ll set that aside.
We are not defining our own illness. Dr. Michael First, the chief editor of the DSM was the one to start defining Body Integrity Identity Disorder… Dr. First doesn’t have BIID, and I suspect he doesn’t fall in the category of “quack”.
As for “discomfort”. If it was just discomfort, I’d deal with it. But it’s not discomfort. It’s F***ing hell. Passing judgement that this is just something people can put up with is showing no empathy whatsoever, and certainly not seeking to understand the condition before judging us.
Being mentally ill isn’t nuts, it is bad luck.
Treating a brain disease by mutilation of the body is nuts–as nuts as treating a paranoid delusion that your neighbor is an evil alien by shooting your neighbor. Each response provides a solution to the problem–irreversibly trading it for a bigger problem.
Comments on this entry are closed.