Abstract
ON OCCASION pain is a useful thing. It may aid in achieving a diagnosis or it may merely bring a patient to a physician so that his ill may be diagnosed. Our purpose is not to talk about such pain but rather to discuss a treatment for pain which results from carcinoma, causalgia or some other condition in which the pain is serving no useful purpose. There are various methods of treating such pain; opiates, sedatives, alcohol injection, neurectomy, rhizotomy and cordotomy all have their place, but in certain, cases none of these may achieve the desired result. Prefrontal lobotomy, originally used for psychosis, has been proposed 1 and used by a number of persons faced with this problem. Freeman and Watts 2 first used prefrontal lobotomy for pain associated with involutional depression in 1936 and have since then performed it on approximately 25 patients having pain of solely organic
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
