Posted by Bipolarsux on March 2, 2003, at 1:20:27
In reply to Re: ECT - long and possibly very boring - sorry » Bipolarsux, posted by ShelliR on February 28, 2003, at 12:49:04
Hi Shelli,> Just wanted to let you know that supposedly *frontal* bilateral ect has the benefit of having the success of bilateral, without all the memory loss.
So I've heard. According to my pdoc it is more-or-less being "trialled" by the hospitals in my area but there has not been a firm verdict made on it yet. There dosen't seem to be many publications on bifrontal, but to me it dosen't matter as much as clinical experience anyway. I might consider bifrontal if unilateral dosen't work, but at this point I still can't see myself consenting to bitemporal.
I get the impression that unilateral is often not given a fair chance because it takes longer to work. I'm going to try and tough it out...> In the hospital where I got ect, all the doctors use frontal bilateral because they have a greater success than unilateral *and* it doesn't have all the side-effects of bilateral non-frontal (like memory loss).
It's pretty cool to hear positive clinical feedback like that.
> When I decided that I wanted to try ect, I would only consider unilateral, but none of the available doctors where I live would consider it.
So I wasn't given any choice.At least I do have that option.
> The positive is that I'm not now sitting here wondering if I had gone for bilateral whether that would have been successful.
Yes, I understand what you mean. It is like the never-ending search for "the" medication that will "cure" you: there's always one you haven't tried and you wonder if it holds the key.
> btw, I also couldn't take valium during the ect because it might have supressed the seizure that is the basis for the ect.
Did you have to completely withdraw, like me, or were you just asked to stop cold turkey, for example, 24 or 48 hrs before a treatment?
>Other than that, I'm not sure whether in general my post ect memory is any worse than it was before. It's hard to tell especially because I'm now doing more drug trials (testing abilify presently) and I'm feeling a bit disoriented--I went up to 15mg just yesterday.
Although I am pretty damn scared of memory loss, I think of how medication affects my memory also, and ECT becomes less frightening. For example, about 90% of the ADs I've tried affected my memory quite badly; benzos are the worst and also affect my verbal recall and fluency.
> So anyway, good luck to you,
Thanks, and thank you very much for your post.
BPsux
poster:Bipolarsux
thread:201088
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030301/msgs/205216.html