Trepanation? This is the weirdest thing I have heard of! (1 Viewer)

[Shawn Shultzaberger]

I was in the Off Topic forum of another site I frequent a lot and this person said they saw a show on TLC about Trepanation. I've never heard of this so I go to the link they supplied. OH MY GOD!!
http://www.trepanation.com/master1.htm
I can't believe someone would do this kind of thing to themselves. To drill a hole in ones head to let it pulsate is...well...um...I just don't know. And I hear that some people get together and have Trepanation parties!
I guess you could say that this is severely Off Topic!
(where's a trepanation frowny face when you need it)

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Doctor Peter Venkmann: Egon, this reminds me of that time you tried to drill a hole in your head.
Doctor Egon Spengler: That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me.

 

[Julie K]

Darnit Vince! That whas going to be my line when I saw this thread!
Honestly, this is just bizarre. I surely don't want any more holes in my head than what's already there. I have good experience in what happens when sudden holes are introduced into skulls to know that this is just a bad, bad thing.
(Hint on my good experience: things turn dead, dead, dead, very very quickly...)

 

[SalMaglie]

My wife works as a nurse in a neurological unit at a local hospital. One day she came home and gave me this drill.
Link Removed
These little Fiskars manual operated drills are actually used by neurosurgeons to drill holes into the patients at bedside. This particular drill was used on a patient without any anesthesia either, and the drill bit was buried into this patient's particularly thick skull.
Anytime somebody tries to tell me about the "wonders of modern medicine", I whip out this drill, tell them how it's used, and quote Bones from Star Trek about how they're just a bunch of savages.

 

[Shayne Lebrun]

Don't forget, it's only 50 years or so ago that 'sulfa powder' was the BIGGEST thing because *gasp* you could ACTUALLY PREVENT INFECTION with it!

 

[CharlesD]

Anyone who has read Patrick O'Brian's wonderful sea-going novels set during the Napoleonic Wars will be familiar with trepaning. According to O'Brian this was a legitimate medical procedure in those days, and in the books one of the main characters, Dr. Maturin, performs the occaisional trepaning.

I suspect that O'Brian used the procedure partly because he just liked the word "trepanation", he liked to use obscure words and terms from those days such as "hapax" (which he uses twice, but I suppose using it just once would be a too-obvious joke for him!)

 

[Jon_Are]

I work on a neurosurgical unit of a hospital and I see patients every day who have had holes drilled into their skulls; some have had more than a hundred surgeries, and these are kids we're talking about. It becomes routine after awhile.
('course, might be a different story if it were my head getting the new hole )
Jon

 

[Brad_W]

The reason they drill the holes is so they can get "high" and possibly hallucinate. I've even heard of people doing this and then dropping LSD tabs in the hole. Most people in this world are just stupid.

 

[Jack Briggs]

We need this like a ...

Actually, the human brain secretes small portions of dimethyltryptamine, DMT--it is a psychedelic substance with effects that are vastly more overwhelming than LSD. In fact, I think that when people claim to have so-called "near death" experiences, they are actually enjoying a DMT rush.

 

[Brad_W]

Jack,

That's what I was thinking/talking about. I didn't know what it was called and thank you for your knowledge! How bizzare is it when people have to drill holes in their head to get high? And what about infection? I mean how do you keep bacteria out of your... head and how do they take a shower... other than "very carefully?"