Today in Weird patienta story worthy of a film, but very real which took place in 1997 in a London hospital!
AB was born in continental Europe in the 1940s before moving to England. She gets married, and takes care of her children full time. His health was of no concern to him before that strange day.winterwinter 1984. She was reading when a voice in her head spoke to her: “ Please don’t be scared. I know it may be shocking for you to hear me talk to you like this, but it’s the easiest way I’ve found. My friend and I work at the Children’s Hospital on Ormont Street and we want to help you. »
Benevolent auditory hallucinations
AB is taken aback, she knows this children’s hospital in London but has never set foot there. Besides, her children are in good health, so she has no valid reason to go there. Another voice continues: “ To prove to you that we are sincere, we would like you to verify the following three pieces of information. » And all three pieces of information were correct. Convinced that she was losing her mind, AB urgently consulted a psychiatrist. This is Doctor Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, psychiatrist at Adult Mental Health Unit of the NHS in London, which takes care of her. He transcribes this extraordinary clinical case in an edition of BMJ, published in 1997.
The psychiatrist diagnosed him with functional hallucinatory psychosis and prescribed thioridazine, a antipsychoticantipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia. Much to AB’s relief, the voices in his mind quieted down a few weeks after starting treatment. But while she is on a family vacation, the voices return and beg her to return to London. Something is wrong with her and she needs to seek treatment immediately. The voices even give an address! With her husband, AB makes the journey carcar and finds himself in front of the medical imaging department of a London hospital.
Tumor, are you there?
In the office of Doctor Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, the patient is in a state of great distress; the voices in her head tell her she has a brain tumor. The psychiatrist insists several times that his patient undergo a to scanto scan despite the absence of typical symptoms of a brain growth. The scanner confirms the hallucinationshallucinations AB hearing aids. A meningioma measuring 6 by 3 centimeters is located on the flax cerebri, a membrane that separates the two hemispheres of the brain. AB decides to have an operation and when she wakes up, she says that the voices sent her a last message: “ We were happy to help you. Bye. » She never had auditory hallucinations again.
This case, presented at a conference on psychiatric disorders, in the presence of AB, caused debate among professionals. Some see it as a case of telepathy with two people who understood that she was suffering from a tumor. Skeptics speak of a convoluted invention by a patient who knew her diagnosticdiagnostic before coming to England and wanted free treatment on the NHS. Others still think that she must have felt something abnormal in her head because of her tumor, and her fear would have materialized in the form of auditory hallucinations. For Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, the total disappearance of symptomssymptoms psychiatric symptoms after the operation prove that they were directly linked to the tumor – perhaps it was the tumor itself that was expressing itself?
