A recent study in England (heard in CBS radio news 26 Feb) reports that some anti-depressants were compared with placebos. The results showed the drugs are not any better than the placebo. Now, consider the following.

"Anti-depressant drugs carpet-bomb the entire body. Electroconvulsive therapy jolts the whole brain. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) aims to pinpoint the malady. Neurosurgeons drill through a patient's skull, place the DBS electrode's eight contact points directly on the trouble spots and connect them to an electrical current from a pacemaker embedded in the chest. This allows doctors to rev up sluggish areas or calm overactive regions." From article.

Remember when Lobotomy was legal? Even the father of Pres. Kennedy was convinced to try it on his daughter and now we have The Special Olympics.

Remember when our propaganda machine told the truth about Nazi medical experiments on prisoners? No, I don't think they used waterboarding, like we do, and many ignore.

Finally, consider this fact: In most cases doctors, quite properly, rely on the answer to the greeting salutation: "And, how are we feeling today, Mrs. Smith?" It is valid and proper.

But, the brain has no nerve endings to sense pain. There is no way to know if a Lobotomy or DBS helps or harms. The response of the patient is not based on facts, perhaps an answer embelished with optimism to reassure others.

What is worse, parents and guardians are asked to approve a procedure that no one has a way to determine the outcome. To do the very exact same thing in two different brains may, or may not, produce similar results. In fact, the results cannot be measured in any scale.

What is worst, there is data collected in MRI studies in Canada that showed that when the same person was asked to solve the same problem twice, interrupted by a night sleep between the two efforts, the areas in the brain that acrively participated in the two solutions were different. The doctor in charge of this experiments concluded that "the brain re-structures itself." Until someone proves otherwise, it seems prudent and wise to believe this result -which invalidates DBS and Lobotomies and phrenology.

US Army soldiers that lost part of their brain confirmed the above finding. Jessica lost a third of her brain and she said she had to learn how to walk and everything, including, she told Mike Wallace: "I had to learn how to think". That was her honest subjective opinion.

The bottom line is that today there is NO theory, not even a hypothesis on how the brain works. We may have up to 100 Trillion synapses and a Neuron may be connected to 1000 other Neurons via a synapses. The only thing we know for sure is that no patterns in them has been discovered. They transmitted myriad chemicals and we know that most of the proteins specified with DNA are found only in the brain. This means all we know about proteins outside the brain is invalid, irrelevant or, possibly, confusing.

Science proceeds from an established general principle to specific applications within the limits of the principle. In this sense, can you tell the difference between DBS and Lobotomy? Remember, a doctor got a Nobel Prize of Medicine for inventing Lobotomy, which is now illegal in most states in the US but legal in some foreign countries. Some claim that it renders patient "easier to handle" -and cheaper.

Any bluntness is regretted but I am a scientist by training and do not wish to risk being misunderstood on this matter. My apologies. No offense intended.