mysteriew said:
They can do lobotomies on many epileptics now, on people who have seizures. They can go in and remove that portion of the brain that causes seizures.
Why can't they use pictures and PET scans to determine which part of a perverts brain is receiving the sexual pleasure from a child, and remove that portion?
Is the technology available? Are they perhaps reluctant to use that technology to do this because of the problems in the past, where they used it indiscriminately on the mentally ill? Would it be ethical to do this on a perv?
I believe that would be the frontal lobes.
There was a case where a tumor caused a person to begin to molest, once removed the urge disappeared.
Edited to add this from cnn:
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't really remember when I started noticing things were different. I don't really remember a time when things weren't bad, when things weren't weird or uneasy.
ZAHN: Christina (ph) is speaking publicly for the first time about being sexually molested by her stepfather when she was just 12 years old. Her mother, Ann (ph), says she first noticed her husband -- we'll call him John Doe -- acting differently on Thanksgiving 1999.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We got into just a really awful fight that day. And it was shortly after that that he began -- this is really hard to say on national TV -- he began touching my daughter.
ZAHN: John Doe pleaded guilty to charges of sexual battery. But what no one knew at the time was that he had an illness and it was growing worse by the day.
RUSSELL SWERDLOW, NEUROLOGIST: And, over here, you can see the tumor in the right frontal part of the brain.
ZAHN: When doctors finally discovered it, the tumor in John Doe's skull was the size of a fist. Dr. Russ Swerdlow, a neurologist who treated him, co-wrote a paper linking the tumor to John Doe's pedophilia.
SWERDLOW: We're pretty confident that this tumor was responsible for a number of reasons. Number one, it was affecting a well- recognized impulse control center in the brain. The other reason is that, after the tumor was removed, he was better.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You know, I can still remember the phone call. He called me from the hospital and said -- and he was crying -- and he said, they found a tumor. And I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy. It's a tumor that's been doing all of this.
ZAHN: By that time, Ann had separated from her husband. But a few months after an operation to remove the tumor they reconciled.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If it was really all physiological, maybe, gosh I would want a second chance. By June of that year, he had moved back in. But by December, I was discovering *advertiser censored* on the computer again. And in January, we realized -- found out the tumor had grown back.
ZAHN: John Doe had a second operation, but by then his marriage to Ann was over. She still questions whether the tumor was entirely responsible for her husband's behavior.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So why only my daughter? Thank God only one child. But why only? So that's the part that I say, well, yes, I wonder.
Why did he only do it when I was gone? Where's the free-will when there there's some question as to -- some way of knowing that there was something he was doing was wrong on some level, he must have known. So if he knew, then what does that say? Is that the tumor?
ZAHN: Dr. Angie Barrill is a forensic neuropsychologist. He's also skeptical about how much a tumor could contribute to pedophilia.
DR. ANGIE BARRILL, FORENSIC NEUROPSYCHOLOGIST: I think people's sexual tastes if you will and why they are so directed toward children as adults, is a complex issue that can't be explained simply by suggesting that someone has a tumor in their frontal lobes or they've had frontal lobe injury. It just doesn't work like that.
ZAHN: Dr. Berrill says the tumor is more likely to have removed some of John Doe's inhibitions causing him to act on impulses he would otherwise control.
