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Did it ever reflect in your thought that Lab induced hallucinations can help patients having Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, etc with better treatment?
Hallucination is considered a psychotic disorder or disease by doctors. People call it disturbance of the brain, disease, condition, or a disorder. But, recent studies and researchers believe that hallucinations can be turn out to be effective in treatment when induced during lab conditions. I can provide them with better understandings. Till now we have considered it as a disease, then how come all of a sudden it’s beneficial for treatment? This question might be triggering in your mind. Go through the article to know everything about hallucinations and other related conditions, also to know what new research has found.
Hallucinations are often confused with psychosis and delusions. Let me tell you one by one what each means and differentiate between them.
Psychosis refers to breakage from reality and it involves delusions, perceptual disturbances, and thinking that is unorganized.
Delusions are definite and fallacy beliefs that cannot be altered or changed by logical debates and could not be unexplainable by the cultural background of the person suffering from the same. There are several delusions including paranoid thinking in which a person believes that he is being followed, tracked, or targeted by someone, the idea behind this is a person believes that a certain event is uniquely related to him, and thought broadcasting, in this delusion a person believes that their thoughts can be audible to other people without them speaking something, etc.
Hallucination is another psychotic disorder, these are recognized sense that is not dependent in reality. It’s distinct from an illusion, which refers to a misconception of existing sensory stimuli for instance when you’re driving on a sunny day, you see water on the road but as soon as you come closer, it disappears, this is an illusion due to external reality or science whereas hallucinations are entirely different. There are many types of hallucinations as the name suggests:
1. Auditory hallucination: these are most commonly seen in a person having schizophrenia. If we talk about auditory hallucinations, the patient might be hearing voices or commands in which they hear about hurting themselves, it is very serious and needs to be screened by the doctors. Sometimes it may also happen that person hears many voices at a time and freaks out.
2. Visual hallucinations: in certain cases, the person sees things that are not present in reality. Visual hallucinations are generally evident in Lewy bodies, dementia, and drug intoxication.
3. Olfactory hallucination: patient tends to smell things. Olfactory hallucinations are often associated with epilepsy or seizure disorder.
4. Tactile hallucinations: this case includes feeling touched by the person. Tactile hallucinations are generally related to drug abuse and alcohol withdrawal.
Keeping in mind the piece of information given about hallucinations and related psychotic disturbances, it is quite evident they are not healthy to have. But, researchers have come up with a piece of mind-boggling information that these hallucinations can help in better treatment. Let’s study how.
Researchers belonging to the University of New South Wales in Australia have found established out that adding hallucinations to a HEALTHY patient may be proved a potent way to research and study neurological conditions and diseases like epilepsy, seizure, Alzheimers, etc.
Lab-induced hallucinations could be introduced to almost everyone at any duration of time. This will lead to help in curbing current extra dependence on finding pathological hallucinations. Hallucinations can be simple as well which includes seeing certain geometrical shapes and colors.
In the laboratory, researchers came up with a fact that flickering lights can be used in the figure of a doughnut in front of a dark background or so. This would create hallucinations of tiny dark blob-like that would be rotating around a ring causing perplexity in the patients making them hallucinate. This was in the case of basic or simple hallucinations, whereas in the case of complex hallucinations far better complex methodologies and techniques are used. The similarity between both of these was studied. Researchers used the continuous spectrum of experience to identify various techniques that could offer useful knowledge about pathological or lab induced hallucinations. This spectrum has a range of veridical perception of hallucination. Illusion falls somewhere between perception and hallucination.
Researchers can determine the underlying principle of the mechanism behind various kinds of hallucinations thus resulting in the possibility of developing better, fast, and reliable treatments for people going through psychotic disorders. Researchers claim that this lab introduced hallucination models to offer better and profitable approaches to new treatment discovery.
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According to doctor Rogers (lead author), lab induced hallucinations can tell better about other types of hallucinations. Currently, few drugs work against hallucinations such as Olanzapine, Amisulpride, Ziprasidone, and Quetiapine.
According to Dr. Keogh, once the mechanism behind hallucination is completely understood using lab induced hallucinations, better treatments can come into existence. At this moment, the treatments are very few and mostly present in the form of medications that are mentioned above. These medications also have side effects sometimes or people. Therefore lab induced hallucinations can be proven to be beneficial.
How do you think Lab induced hallucinations can lead to better treatment?
featured image credit: https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/thinking-and-awareness/2018/what-are-hallucinations-020718
