Relatives of lobotomy patients want nobel prize revoked.

Hinkly Dinkly Reporting!

Thirty years after doctors stopped performing lobotomies to treat mental illness, epilepsy and even chronic headaches, relatives of patients who suffered after undergoing the procedure want the Nobel Prize given to its inventor revoked.

The issue has resurfaced following the release of a new book that contends the crude brain surgery only helped about 10 percent of the estimated 50,000 Americans who received lobotomies from the mid-1930s to the 1970s.

"I think the numbers that were harmed were quite substantial,' said a medical historian. "It was way overused, and it was used in inappropriate circumstances -- retardation, anxiety, headaches.'

Relatives of patients who underwent the procedure agree. They are pushing the Nobel Foundation to posthumously strip the prize given to the lobotomy's pioneer, Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz.

Through holes drilled in the skull, he cut through nerve fibers connecting the brain's frontal lobe, which controls thinking, with other brain regions -- believing that as new nerve connections formed the patient's abnormal behavior would end.

Other doctors used a more primitive version than Moniz, punching an ice pick into the brain above the eye socket and blindly manipulating it to sever nerve fibers, (sounds like a perfect HMO procedure).

Modern views of the lobotomy have led to a call to pull Moniz's Nobel prize.

The Nobel Foundation refused to remove or change the article.

"There's no possibility to revoke it,' said the foundation executive director. “The Nobel charter has no provision for appeal of a prize awarded, and the foundation ignores such criticisms, as it did when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Peace Prize was challenged.”

This reporter reminds us, the word is Nobel, not noble.

Hinkly Out!
By George