In the Death by Ecstasy in the 22nd Century, Gil 'the ARM' Hamilton has a friend, Owen Jennison, who dies of Current Addiction. Who needs drugs when you can plug your brains pleasure centre directly into an electrical power socket. Electricity is cheap, and the experience is so good, that you might forget to sleep, or even eat, until you waste away and die. This is the ultimate fix, although there is an initial cost to buy the transformer equipment and have the operation. 'Wire Heads' are another problem which 22nd Century society has to deal with.
"Heh! Could you spare 10p for some batteries!"
All he was trying to do was ease her chronic back pain, but when Dr. Stuart Meloy placed an electrode into one patient's back, she groaned. Not in pain, but in delight. "This is a direct quote: she said, 'You're going to have to teach my husband how to do that',"
Meloy, an anaesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had stumbled onto an unexpected side effect of the pain device he was using: an ability to cause pleasure. He has just patented this unexpected use of the device, a spinal cord stimulator made by device company Medtronic. Now he is trying to talk Minneapolis-based Medtronic into marketing the device for this use.
It all started with a relatively routine operation for Meloy, who was trying to help a patient with severe and untreatable back pain. "She had had a number of back surgeries for degenerative disk disease and fusion surgery," Meloy said. He was testing out Medtronic's spinal cord stimulator to see if it might work in her case. "These people are either suffering a lot or there is certainly a place for narcotics to be used." The surgeon has to place an electrode very precisely in the patient's spine. The idea is to find the specific nerve bundle that is carrying his or her pain signals to the brain.
It requires some trial and error and sometimes, Meloy said, the surgeon hurts a patient, who will groan or cry out. At first he thought this had happened with this patient.
She made a "different" sound.
"But the sound that she made was a little bit different. I asked her what it was," he said. That was when she recommended he teach her husband the technique. "The next day in the operating room, the nurses were all asking me how one gets that," Meloy deadpanned.
Meloy said he repositioned the electrode and was able to help the patient's pain. "We able to reduce her narcotics usage by about a half," he said. He was not able to offer her a dual use of the pacemaker-sized device, which is implanted under the skin. The device works not to block pain but to change the way the patient perceives it. "Instead of feeling pain, they feel what most people describe as a buzzing sensation in the affected area," Meloy said. "It's not so much a distraction as a change in perception. You are altering what they feel." It would be to allow people to have more of a normal life than some sort of supernormal life."
Even for pain management patients we certainly exhaust all other possibilities before we start utilizing this type of technique," he said. Will it work on all kinds of people, men as well as women? "I observed it twice," Meloy said. "Is it reproducible? I sure hope so."
"Heh! Could you spare 10p for some batteries!"
All he was trying to do was ease her chronic back pain, but when Dr. Stuart Meloy placed an electrode into one patient's back, she groaned. Not in pain, but in delight. "This is a direct quote: she said, 'You're going to have to teach my husband how to do that',"
Meloy, an anaesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had stumbled onto an unexpected side effect of the pain device he was using: an ability to cause pleasure. He has just patented this unexpected use of the device, a spinal cord stimulator made by device company Medtronic. Now he is trying to talk Minneapolis-based Medtronic into marketing the device for this use.
It all started with a relatively routine operation for Meloy, who was trying to help a patient with severe and untreatable back pain. "She had had a number of back surgeries for degenerative disk disease and fusion surgery," Meloy said. He was testing out Medtronic's spinal cord stimulator to see if it might work in her case. "These people are either suffering a lot or there is certainly a place for narcotics to be used." The surgeon has to place an electrode very precisely in the patient's spine. The idea is to find the specific nerve bundle that is carrying his or her pain signals to the brain.
It requires some trial and error and sometimes, Meloy said, the surgeon hurts a patient, who will groan or cry out. At first he thought this had happened with this patient.
She made a "different" sound.
"But the sound that she made was a little bit different. I asked her what it was," he said. That was when she recommended he teach her husband the technique. "The next day in the operating room, the nurses were all asking me how one gets that," Meloy deadpanned.
Meloy said he repositioned the electrode and was able to help the patient's pain. "We able to reduce her narcotics usage by about a half," he said. He was not able to offer her a dual use of the pacemaker-sized device, which is implanted under the skin. The device works not to block pain but to change the way the patient perceives it. "Instead of feeling pain, they feel what most people describe as a buzzing sensation in the affected area," Meloy said. "It's not so much a distraction as a change in perception. You are altering what they feel." It would be to allow people to have more of a normal life than some sort of supernormal life."
Even for pain management patients we certainly exhaust all other possibilities before we start utilizing this type of technique," he said. Will it work on all kinds of people, men as well as women? "I observed it twice," Meloy said. "Is it reproducible? I sure hope so."
