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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32851 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html

This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.

I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.

I wonder how bad her Tinnitus or hearing loss were. I might consider euthanasia if I ended up totally deaf or blind.

Really bad tinnitus is much worse than being just deaf. It's being deaf with infernal ringing going in your ears every moment you're awake and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. People have killed themselves over it.

Is there any progress on treatment actually? I've heard they were some minor successes with CBT for it.

I think it's mostly accepted that there is surprisingly little correlation between severity of tinnitus and its resultant psychological suffering. (Oddly, there is a good correlation between severity and degree of hearing loss. Weird, huh, unless, of course, I am just remembering facts that don't exist, which sometimes happens). So it is not surprising that while there are no drugs or viable candidates that treat tinnitus specifically, general psychopharmacological treatments do help, as well as, as you mentioned, coping strategies etc. Why some (most) people seem not to be particularly bothered by the ringing that drives others to madness, I don't know.

There are many attempts at translational pharmacology (because we have a massive pharmacopoeia, a general understanding of the mechanisms of most drugs, and it is so cheap and safe) and my understanding is that there are lots of drugs that offer very small percentages of patients apparent benefits. Are these all patients of the same type, or is it like antidepressants where trying multiple drugs barely better than placebo additively works pretty well?

Anecdotally, I know someone who swears by Lyrica for it, though it was prescribed for sciatica. I took a few pills during a nasty backache and had no effects at all until maybe four hours later I found myself lost in my own literal backyard, so I can see how it might do the trick in a pinch ...

I suppose the second best investment option for (or from the POV of) sufferers would be for general hearing restoration treatments.

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