Bioethics

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate November 2001

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Thesis: Is it ethical to use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) as treatments for mental illnesses? TMS was introduced in 1980's because technical developments made it possible to apply TMS in trains of multiple simuli per second in the late 1980's.

In 1819, Hans Christian Oersted started experimenting with electromagnetism. In 1831, Michael Faraday starts to experiment with electromagnetic induction. By 1833, Duchenne de Boulogne had begun experiments involving the simulation of muscles with surface electrodes. This was followed in 1853 by Hermann von Helmholtz measuring the speed of nerve impulses with electrical stimulation and a mechanical twitch recorder; this results in pioneering discoveries in electromagnetism (reciprocity etc.) Bartholow does experiments regarding the excitability of human brain while stimulating exposed cortex in patients with large cranial defect in 1874. In 1896, Arsenne d'Arsonval sees phosphenes and vertigo (& in some persons syncope) when subjects' heads placed inside an induction coil.

This results in Kolin being the first to magnetically stimulate nerves (a frog sciatic-nerve) in 1959. By 1965, R.G. Bickford & B.D. Fremming are the first to magnetically stimulate human nerves using harmonic magnetic fields. M.J.R. Polson, A.T. Barker, & I.L. Freeston stimulate subjects with brief magnetic field pulses and are the first to demonstrate peripheral nerve stimulation using simultaneous electromyographic recordings in 1976. Merton & Morton, 1980, test non-invasive brain stimulation with scalp electrodes. In 1985, A.T. Barker, R. Jalinous, and I. Freeston test non-invasive, painless, cortical stimulation with magnetic fields. David Cohen, in 1984, & Shooho Ueno, in 1988, think of the figure-of-eight coil. R.Q. Cracco, V.E. Amassian, PJ Maccabee & JB Cracco all recorde magnetically evoked cortical responses from the scalp with electrodes that are placed on either side of head in 1989. In 1987 & 1988, Cadwell Laboratories, Inc. test repetitive stimulation with...