"Classics in ECT" brings you this set of responsive LTEs from the Green Journal, 1973:
Letters to the editor: Drug dosage in ECT.
Am J Psychiatry. 1973 Nov;130(11):1293-4. doi: 10.1176/ajp.130.11.1293.PMID: 4746045
The letters are here:
Dr. Corbett Thigpen suggested using pentylenetetrazole to enhance seizures and got this flurry of responses. There was also a typo in his original letter, in which the dose of methohexital was written as an order of magnitude too great. There are multiple anesthesia issues discussed in the above; my take-home synthetic message is that we are lucky to practice in the modern age, when all (or most) of these idiosyncrasies have been subsumed into more standardized practice.
And Dr. Thigpen is most famous for:
Dr Kellner. Thank you for this interesting historical pespective. Dr Thigpen practiced at the Medical College of Georgia (MCG), and in the 1960 the MCG was a leading consumer of succinylcholine (there was so much ECT going on at MCG). Dr. Thigpen wrote the above book with his chairman Dr Cleckley and together they also wrote "The Mask of Sanity" which is a classic expositon on the topic of sociopathy. Drs. Peter Rosenquist, Sadarsh Surya and I have the privelege of serving as the present-day ECT providers at MCG. We agree with you about the practice of ECT - we are grateful to have brought MCG's ECT practice into synch with modern guidelines!
ReplyDelete