Chinese Drug Rehab

The Chinese surely are inscrutable. They have developed a special medical practice to curb drug addiction - brain surgery. From Xinhua:

Qi Guoming, chief of the Science and Education Department under the Health Ministry, said the surgery is still under clinical studies but not for clinical use.

"It is irresponsible and immoral to conduct the operation before an experimental conclusion is reached. Therefore, we are not resuming it," he said.

Brain surgery for curing drug addicts is a key research field and the ministry is thinking about applying for national fund for scientific studies given by the Ministry of Science and Technology, said Qi.

Health Ministry's spokesman Mao Qun said last month that brain surgery to curb drug cravings is a special medical practice. Those hospitals and doctors who perform the operation, as well as the equipment, environment and post-surgery observation, must be qualified and standardized.

Qi also stressed at the same day that before the ministry carries out a scheme and regulation for the clinical studies of brain surgery, any medical unit cannot perform the surgery in the name of clinical study or service.

Brain surgery was suspended on Nov. 2 last year by the ministry because of disputes over its unidentified side effects among medical experts. Evaluation and argument of the operation have been lasting ever since. [Emphasis mine - ed.]

[ ... ]

By Nov. 2 when the operation was suspended, about 500 patients had received the surgery throughout China. Most of them reported positive results, but some of them appeared abnormal symptoms, like the loss of sex drive.

Okay, you're addicted so they operate on your brain and you end up with no libido. Notably, the Russians used to do the same procedure for addiction but they stopped in 2002 because people complained of headaches. Boy, that's a shock. The Russians also found that it didn't cure addiction. Ah, but the inscrutable Chinese persevere.

And you've got to love their reasoning for suspending the practice in Nov. "Disputes over its unidentified side effects among medical experts" has to mean that they were arguing about what they didn't know. Now, that's the cutting edge of science.