Surgery cures "devil possessed" girl
June 20, 2014 at 10:43 pm
(This post was last modified: June 20, 2014 at 10:44 pm by Cyberman.)
Quote:Researchers report the curious medical case of a six-year-old girl from Bolivia who had uncontrollable and inappropriate fits of laugher. “She was considered spoiled, crazy, even devil-possessed,” José Liders Burgos Zuleta of the Advanced Medical Image Centre in La Paz, Bolivia, says in a news release. Doctors diagnosed her with “misbehavior.”
After imaging her brain using CT, PET, and MRI scans, Liders Burgos and colleagues were able to diagnose the cause of the girl’s gelastic (or laughing) seizures: They discovered a hamartoma -- a small, benign, tumor-like growth -- pressing on the temporal lobe of her brain.
After surgery to remove the tumour, the little girl is said to be recovering normally, without any further seizures, and now only laughs for normal reasons.
I can't help wondering, though, what might have happened had she been born at a time when, or in a place where, the first recourse is to exorcism; which has a terrible, if consistent, track record just in the last forty years alone. Whether she would have survived the rituals or not, the effect on the real cause would have been zero.
Humans and medical science: +1 yet again.
Magic: still yet to score.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
