Strange, Weird & Bizarre Medical Cases & Facts

Somnambulism, also known as sleepwalking, is thought to affect between 1% and 15% of the American population.  The causes are cited to be anything from restless leg syndrome to mental illness, and the manifestations are even wider spread.  There are some cases where people have been said to cook, eat, engage in sexual activity, and even murder…all in their sleep.

When we sleep, that sleep undergoes several stages.  You have your NREM sleep, which is divided into stage 1, stage 2, and stage 3 and 4.  Stage 1 is that light sleep, while stage 2 is a consolidated sleep period, stages 3 and 4 are deep sleep stages (known as “slow-wave sleep”), and after these stages we reach REM state.  REM sleep (REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement) is where your eyes move rapidly under your eyelids, your respiration and heart rate can be irregular, and this is when you’re most likely to dream.  Despite the rapid movement of the eyes, the respiration and heart rate irregularities, and the fact that your brain is possibly occupied by a dream, this is supposed to be our most restful stage of sleep, and it accounts for 90-120 minutes of a total night’s sleep.  “Normal” sleepwalking occurs during the REM state, and if you do it you are considered to have a “REM State Sleeping Disorder.”

Sleepwalking can occur outside of the REM state, during stages 3 and 4 of NREM, during that deepest sleep.  Specialists aren’t completely sure what causes the high-voltage delta waves that characterize sleepwalking.  Some think it is a reactionary condition brought on by exhaustion, fever, or something similar.  In some cases it is.  In other cases, somnambulism occurs because of much deeper seated problem.  For instance, many drug users are known to sleepwalk, and people with schizophrenia and anxiety disorders are more likely to be sleepwalkers.  New research shows that sufferers of Tourette Syndrome and frequent migraine headaches are more prone to sleepwalk.

So, what of these people who claim to have had sex, cooked, sent email, and even murdered in their sleep.  This is because, as we mentioned before, REM stage sleepwalking is one thing, but NREM sleepwalking is something else.  During that stage 3 and 4 sleep, the brain is supposed to be, for lack of a better term, quiet.  In a NREM state sleeping disorder, part of the brain wakes up, and causes the person to do all sorts of things.  If that person is predisposed or in the “right” mindframe, they certainly can be capable of murder.

And, given that certain types of insomnia are considered a mental illness, they’ll probably get away with it.

Related articles

• Symptoms And Treatments ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder (frommyexperience.com)
• Tall People – A Chronicle of Remarkable “Giants” (bizarrebytes.com)
• Chiropractic Adjustments Even Help Baby with Colic (chiropractorservice.com)

The condition is called polymelia – it is when a person is born with more limbs than usual (the usual, in case you’ve forgotten, is four).  The condition can result from twins becoming fused together in the womb – one survives and the non-surviving twin’s limbs are attached to the living twin.  This condition is further called ischiopagus.  Other times, the body axis becomes distorted and the child can grow extra legs.

Read the rest of this entry →

What do Gottlieb Burckhardt, Egas Moniz, and Walter Freeman have in common?  Other than the fact that I had never heard of them before researching this topic, it turns out that they were all dudes who lobotomized their patients.

photo by OpenSkyMedia

A lobotomy is a brain surgery that cuts the connectors between the front bits and the back bits of the brain.  European doctors started performing the procedure on mental patients in the early 20th century, along with other radical therapies for extreme mental illness and insanity.  Other procedures included electroshock (or electroconvulsive) therapy, drug-induced deep sleep therapy, and more.

I am not, by any means, denouncing the entire psychiatric community for coming up with risky, damaging, and invasive radical treatments to try out on helpless mental patients.  Nope.  Not me.  Anyway…

Gottlieb Burckhardt was a psychiatrist in the late 1800′s and he performed lobotomies on six patients with varied diagnoses.  Two of the patients simply became more subdued, one died shortly after surgery, two were unaffected altogether, and one seemed to improve but then later committed suicide.

Egas Moniz was a Portuguese neurologist changed the surgery a bit – he drilled holes into the heads and injected alcohol to kill the frontal lobes.  I guess that didn’t work, because he came up with a tool called a leucotome that was really just a wire loop that scrambled stuff around in the patient’s heads.  This work, which took place in the mid-thirties, had better success rates than one would expect, earned Moniz the 1949 Nobel Prize for medicine.

Walter Freeman studied Moniz’s work and along with a guy named James Watts altered the practice and created their own procedure.  Called the Freeman-Watts procedure, they would drill into the scalp, and then later would go in through the eye socket.

1949 was the big year for lobotomies, with more than 18608 lobotomies taking place in the United States by 1951.  JFK’s sister had a lobotomy when she was 23 and she was never OK after that.  Same with Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose.  Other people, like Howard Dully and Alys Robi turned out just fine, but at the same time lots of people died.

That’s probably why they don’t do them anymore.