IST -
Insulin Shock Treatment (Wiki)
Also
referred to as Insulin Coma Therapy (ICT)
Also referred to as Insulin Shock Therapy
(IST)
I don't think that this is even legal any more. Massive
amounts of insulin are injected into you, causing
convulsions and coma. After an hour, the patient is
revived by injecting the patient with a warm saline
solution via a stomach tube or by intravenously
injecting the patient with glucose; sadly, sometimes the
coma does not end; happily, such an occurrence is rare.
It was considered to be an effective treatment for all sorts of psychiatric ailment and was discovered in 1933;
interestingly, the treatment seemed to have an
apparently higher success rate in schizophrenia where
the patient in question had suffered from the illness
for less than two years, sometimes prompting a
"spontaneous recovery". Epileptic seizures typically
occured only 45-100 minutes into the the procedure.
However, IST is now considered to have little beneficial
effect beyond shock or placæbo effect and as such is
viewed as a cruel practice.
With regards to side effects, IST is hampered with several
serious possible problems. As was stated earlier, comatose
states could reach an excessive intensity, prompting to the
procedure being abandoned quickly. In order to limit the
chances of this happening, vital sings are monitored
throughout the procedure. Sometimes the induced coma
persists, a very serious complication. Other problems
include Anoxia, Hypertonia, Vascular Shock and, in more
minor cases, selective paralysis, Aphasia and confusion.
"With insulin-shock treatment, the
patient is given increasingly large doses of insulin, which
reduce the sugar content of the blood and bring on a state
of coma. Usually the comatose condition is allowed to
persist for about an hour, at which time it is terminated
by administering warm salt solution via stomach tube or by
intravenous injection of glucose. Insulin shock had its
greatest effectiveness with schizophrenic patients whose
illness had lasted less than two years (the rate of
spontaneous recovery from schizophrenia also is highest in
the first two years of the illness). Insulin-shock therapy
also had more value in the treatment of paranoid and
catatonic schizophrenia than in the hebephrenic types."
- Encyclopædia
Britannica
??????????????