Electroconvulsive Therapy

Download or read book Electroconvulsive Therapy written by Richard Abrams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-27 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enthusiastically defending the controversial use of electroconvulsive "therapy" (ECT), Abrams (psychiatry, Chicago Medical School), the director of a firm that manufactures ECT devices, reviews the practice and its literature. He briefly discusses the history of ECT and then outlines current practice and addresses the use of unilateral versus bitemporal ECT. He argues against the studies that find ECT to be a dangerous and unhelpful procedure. A final chapter considers ethical and legal issues, finding that doctors who refuse to subject patients to electroshock are behaving unethically and that malpractice suits are a relatively minor problem. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.