Thursday, June 21, 2012

Do you feel being shot in the head?

OK, thriller writers, this is for you.  It's  is a bizarre topic, but someone thought it worth research, and it points up that there's a lot we don't know about pain, consciousness, and neurological damage.  There's sort of a consensus that a bullet to the head in a location causing quick death won't be felt, but about half of people shot in the head survive (obviously Gabby Giffords is a notable recent example) and some feel pain and some don't.  The writer reports: "There is one rare effect, called the Krönlein shot, where a high powered shot messily opens the skull but neatly ejects the whole brain on the ground. "  I felt no urge to find pictures. The good side of all this is how many people, like Congresswoman Giffords, survive wounds that would have been treated only with a shot of morphine a couple of decades back.  The bad news is that we humans are still finding reasons - or, often, nonreasons - to make this field of study a medical neccessity.

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