Electroconvulsive Therapy

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Electroconvulsive therapy uses electricity to induce seizures in the brain. It is used to treat severe depression, treatment-resistant depression, severe mania, catatonia, agitation and aggression in people with dementia. This type of therapy originated in Italy during the late 1930’s. Previous methods of inducing seizures had been much more dangerous and feared by patients. A chemical called Metrazol was used to induce seizures and patients who had used it reported feeling immense terror before the seizure occurred. A Cleveland psychiatrist reported, “the doctors and nurses used to chase the patients around the room to get them to take Metrazol.” ECT was created to make a safer, more humane, and less fearsome method of inducing seizures. Within only a few years, the use of ETC had become widely accepted and administered in many mental hospitals.(Sadowsky, 2017) Electroconvulsive therapy should be used(with the consent of the patient) if the patient has been unsusceptible to other methods for curing depression and symptoms of mental illnesses, due to its quickness and effectiveness in curing patients.
The electroconvulsive therapy treatment begins with the patient being under anesthesia, while small electric currents flow throughout their brain. These electric currents result in a small, less than 60
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Chemotherapy for cancer uses surgery and radiation therapy to remove, kill, or damage cancer cells. (ACS, 2016)Although chemotherapy is used to cure cancer, it requires patents to undergo awful physical and sometimes near death experiences. Sometimes the possible positive outcomes of a treatment outweigh the potential risks. The curing of very serious depression must be considered when deciding whether ECT is a moral

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