A psychiatrist looks at his own brain (spoiler alert) and companies that want to scan ours
Dr. Daniel Carlat, a psychiatrist at Tufts University School of Medicine and publisher of The Carlat Psychiatry report, writes in Wired magazine about having his brain scanned by businesses that market functional neuroimaging for anything from diagnosing psychiatric disorders to detecting lies.
"The next day, I'm back at my office. I see my patients, listen to their troubles, try to understand what drives their suffering, and prescribe my nostrums. I deal in brain trouble, and meaningful pictures of what is going on behind their pained expressions would aid my work immeasurably," he writes. "After my last patient, I pull out ... snapshots of my own brain. My journey through the land of functional neuroimaging has helped me to understand how spectacularly meaningless these images are likely to be."
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Elizabeth Cooney covers health for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. She
previously reported on business and was an editor at the paper. Earlier in
her career, she edited medical books and journals at Little, Brown, and
worked for Boston magazine.Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
- Karen Weintraub, Deputy Health and Science Editor
- Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor
- Ishani Ganguli, Short White Coat blogger
- Joshua U. Klein, M.D., Short White Coat blogger
