Salon does it again

Here is a LTE I wrote to Salon in response to their article "Head Case" (sub required or you can watch an ad to access for free):

Dear Editor-

The article “Head Case” asserts that biological treatment of headaches, especially in women, is new. This is flat out wrong. Ask the women who were lobotomized (yes, lobotomized) in the 40s and 50s for “intractable pain”. These were women with no history of mental illness at all. Obviously, since the same operation was used to treat mental illness, there was long ago a supposed connection made between psychiatric problems and pain, including headaches.

It annoys me a great deal to see articles that talk about these treatments and ideas as if they were new. They are as old as the hills and as ineffective as ever as Kamen’s total lack of relief proves.

Freud, with all his supposed sins against women, at least knew bogus cures like hydrotherapy when he saw them. People today will apparently believe anything. Fig leaf tea in the eye indeed.

Sincerely,

Christine Johnson
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The fig tea thing refers to the author's attempt to be cured of headaches by having an "alternative healer" drip fig tea into her eye. Throughout the article she's bent out of shape because "old thinkers" believe her headaches are psychological, but then she accepts all this crap about how great modern medicine is and how they understand that it's all biological now. She waxes poetic about PET scans and functional MRIs, yet she fails to acknowledge that no one has cured her of a damn thing - she still suffers from debilitating headaches.