Talk:Convulsive therapy

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 * The History of Shock Therapy in Psychiatry (This page is not opening)
 * I have reintroduced the reference to the article's new site. Also, I removed the notice about merging with electroconvulsive therapy, because this one is a more general treatment of all kinds of shock therapy. Furthermore, due to its lenght and completeness, it is no longer a stub. --R.Sabbatini 12:08, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

title change for article
Really what this article should be titled is conlusive therapy.--scuro 18:25, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Your and NMG20's comments make sense to me. All therapies listed on this page cause convulsions, and all don't use electric shocks.  I'll start working on this page. Chupper 23:11, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

References supporting this definition of shock therapy needed
This article claims that shock therapy is a treatment designed to induce a state of medical shock - I can't speak for all the treatments here, but this is certainly untrue where electroconvulsive therapy is concerned, where the therapeutic mechanism is believed to be the induction of a therapeutic clonic seizure. Effectively, this means that this "shock therapy" works by electric shock, as one would intuitively think.

Put simply, there is no way a seizure could cause medical shock, which is a state of acute tissue hypoxia, as in anaphylactic shock or hypovolaemic shock; even in the massively prolonged, uncontrolled seizures of status epilepticus, the mechanism of damage is build-up of neurotransmitter, not hypoxia. The brain's ability to autoregulate cerebral perfusion pressure is maintained except in severe haemodynamic compromise, and passing a current through the brain doesn't do anything to a patient's haemodynamic status.

Similarly, the descriptions in this article of "malarial fever therapy" don't deal with medical shock, "insulin shock therapy" specifies hypoglycaemia as its therapeutic mechanism, "metrazol shock therapy" and "pharmacological shock therapy" specify seizures. None of these have anything to do with shock in the medical sense of the word.

I'm therefore going to make clear that the mechanisms of these treatments are not fully understood, but have nothing to do with medical shock, and have requested citations where I think they're needed. Nmg20 00:13, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

There are still a large number of unreferenced claims in this article, and the requests were added (by me) at the end of June, about three months ago. May I suggest that if these claims can't be verified, there isn't much of the article left...? Nmg20 12:28, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I second that motion. --scuro 15:51, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I've sent messages to all posters on this page (correction: there were too many editors of the article proper to message them all!) inviting them to reference-find. If nothing happens by October, I'll propose the article for deletion. Nmg20 17:14, 25 September 2007 (UTC)


 * You have the patience of Job.--scuro 20:37, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

No responses to any of the messages I sent, no citations after a five-month time lag - so I've proposed it for deletion per (all of) the above. Nmg20 01:32, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok - the proposed deletion tag has just been removed for what I feel are pretty spurious reasons given the article history and its total unverifiability per the above. I'm therefore adding an afd tag to it so it can get discussed per Articles for deletion. Nmg20 (talk) 12:04, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

NB: per the afd guidelines, I notified everyone with four or more edits of the article via talk. This was User:Rsabbatini, User:59.167.220.188, User:Chupper, User:DavidCooke, and User:Kwertii; several of these I had already messaged to ask if they knew of sources for the article. I will also notify major contributors here on the talk page. Nmg20 (talk) 12:24, 17 November 2007 (UTC)