The household includes Lucy's fragile 12-year-old half sister, Hannah, a self-converted Christian fundamentalist and keeper of compulsive disease charts, and Agneth, her grandmother, a Norwegian who possesses the closest thing in the family to practical sense.
A partial list of diseases treated includes chronic pain, Parkinson's disease (PD), essential tremor, dystonia, epilepsy, depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disease, Alzheimer's disease, addictive substance abuse disorders and eating disorders.
For example, regional changes of GM indicating structural plasticity with reversible (upon treatment) GM decrease have been shown with VBM for pathologic states such as immobilization [ 8], pain syndromes [ 30], obsessive compulsive disease [ 31], but also action induced GM increase for sports like juggling [ 7] and playing golf [ 9].
Is compulsive shopping a biologically driven disease of the brain, a learned habit run amok, an addiction in its own right, or a symptom of the other dysfunctions — most notably depression — that so often accompany it?
Still, not everyone sees compulsive shopping as a disease.
For whatever reasons -- perhaps because they make high intelligence look like a social disease -- compulsive, madness-skirting geniuses have become popular on American stages and screens.
Deep brain stimulation, which now involves surgically inserting electrodes several inches into a person's brain and connecting them to a power source outside the skull, can be an extremely effective treatment for disorders such as Parkinson's disease, obsessive compulsive disorder, and depression.
In fact, unappeasable itch which is a cardinal feature of this disease incites compulsive scratching resulting in skin erosions.
Several studies have also found differences in striatal activations in response to wins and losses when comparing patients with Parkinson's disease with compulsive behaviour ON medication to patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (Steeves et al., 2009; Voon et al., 2010) or in healthy subjects who were given dopaminergic modulating drugs (Pessiglione et al., 2006; Cools et al., 2007).
For example, somewhat similar increases in theta power observed in the resting MEG signal recorded from patients with Parkinson's disease, obsessive compulsive disorder and other syndromes have been proposed to arise in the setting of less severe deafferentation and disfacilitation of thalamic neurons producing a 'thalamocortical dysrhymia' syndrome (Jeanmonod et al., 1996; Llinás et al., 1999).
I wondered if the compulsive naming of parts, diseases and chemical reactions – frenulum, otitis, glycolysis – was a mechanism invented by doctors to defend themselves against a largely unknowable sphere of knowledge".
