Re: Body Integrity Identity Disorder.
boomerang wrote:Newsweek recently ran an article on BIID (http://www.newsweek.com/id/138932/page/1) Have you heard of this?
It seems that some people have a disorder that causes them to identify a body part as NOT belonging to their own body. They go to great lenghts to remove the body part - amputating it, shooting it off, traveling to underground doctors to have it removed, all kinds of extremes.
Research is finding that people with BIID do have a different structure to their brains. People suffering from BIID want to have it recognized as a genuine mental disorder so that they can safely and legally have the limb removed; they say nothing else, not therapy, not medication, not anything else works.
When I think of a doctor's oath of "first do no harm" I can't imagine any of them ever agreeing to remove a healthy limb. But when I read about this disorder and what people are willing to do to be rid of their body part I do have to wonder if a doctor's denial is more harmful.
What do you think?
I saw a piece on this some time ago....one of the people they were talking to said something like...he would wake up at night and find a strange leg in the bed with him, so he would throw it out of the bed, and end up throwing himself in the floor by doing so, because it was his leg....I laughed...WTH? But like most things of this nature, there is simply some wiring not connected right...read that however you want. {brain to leg/in the brain itself}
There is a video of a dog chewing on a bone, and one of it's back legs keeps coming up toward it, the dog repeatedly growls at and attacks it....when I saw that, this story popped into my mind...perhaps a similar thing going on there.
I suppose it would be best to have it surgically removed than to let someone hack at themselves, the ones in the story that had underwent surgery were content.
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Dog -
http://www.digyourowngrave.com/dog-fights-over-a-bone-with-his-own-foot/
