Bilateral cingulotomy

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The bilateral cingulotomy is a brain surgery performed to treat chronic pain in cancer patients. Controversially, it is also a self-proclaimed "modern psychosurgical technique" that has replaced the lobotomy as a direct brain surgery used to alleviate mental illness such as major depression, bipolar disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder when the condition in question has not responded to psychotherapy, behavioral therapy, electroshock, or pharmacological treatment.

Bilateral cingulotomy consists of disabling the cingulate gyrus, a small section of brain that connects the limbic region of the brain with the frontal lobes. Its use for alleviation of pain in cancer patients is reasonably well-documented and well-supported, but its use in treating people with depression is not. Because of the latter, and its resultant lack of official approval by any reputable medical association for that purpose, people in Western society suffering from depression who are aware of this alternate application of bilateral cingulotomy may (as in other, similar cases with other conditions) avail themselves of charlatan surgeons in obscure East Asian or Latin American clinics, sometimes leading to severe brain infection due to unclean surgical tools, but thus far not leading to documented improvement in the area of depression.