You take 200 depressed people, implant wires into their brains. Half of the implants you charge with electricity, half you don’t, to get a good control group. Results? A flop, but some people want to keep the implants after the test. Why? Well, as studies have established, depressed people feel better when people ask them how they feel, with a live person running their fingers through those wires in the head. Ethics aside, the big question is – who will pay for these implants, the follow ups, the flashlight batteries, and after the subject’s demise the autopsy, brain slicing and microscopy?
The patients won’t be paying, because as psychiatry transitions from pharmaceuticals that don’t work to implants that won’t work (electroceuticals they are called) bigpharma needs trillion-dollar revenues to overcome generic drug competition, expiring patents, the gradually rising specter of drug side effects such as mass murder, and basically, the fact that popular drugs like antidepressants don’t work, or work only because of “the placebo effect.” And to fund this transition we’re talking big money, that can only come from Medicare, the Veterans Administration, insurance companies or best of all, a single-payer health care system that operates on “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”
This is the beginning, IMHO, of a drive to get deep brain implants, and their cousins, “transcranial magnetic stimulation” paid for not as freaky science experiments but as legitimate treatments for mental and physical disorders. And that means some big bucks, in the “Trillion-with-a-T” range. In exchange, perhaps we can one day plug into our computers and learn to play the piano or dance the tethered tango.
In the meantime, to get us accustomed to the idea, we’re already implanting RFID dog-tracking chips in people for their own good and to give them immediate access to buy stuff from the snack machine, login to computers and use pay toilets. It’s like those spy movies where the guy — to get off the grid — must dig a tracking chip out of his arm with a steak knife.
First to get the implants will be guys with big federal government pockets. Veterans with VA benefits and PTSD, most likely, on lifetime subscription plans paid for by adding to our Chinese debt. Anyway, we’re being railroaded down the track of bad ideas fueled by good sci-fi movies. And – I have to do this – as the Borg always said, “resistance is futile.“
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