The Alien Hand and Epilepsy: Two Misunderstood Conditions

churchboy (60)in #stemng • 6 years ago

What a Wonderful World

Medical staff must be accustomed to strange things, and they must strongly believe in medicine. I could imagine them running into trouble now and then if they failed to do these two things.

For instance, shortly after the baby's birth, it is evaluated for its ability to survive outside the uterus (yeah, it's a jungle out there). The mouth and nose are suctioned to remove all secretions and possible blockages to aid breathing, then gentle stimulation of the baby by rubbing its back gently or stimulating its feet. These actions would make the baby cry, and this is probably the only time that the parents, uncles, aunties and the rest of the crowd would be happy to hear the baby cry. As you may have suspected, things do not always work that way. For instance, when my little sister was born, and they stimulated her feet, she laughed. She laughed in a way you would laugh if Dave Chapelle were standing in front of you. Of course, the nurse knew that Dave was not in the room and since she had never seen a thing like that, she dropped her on the nearest bed and found the exit fast. Stranger things do happen in the hospital.

The Alien Hand

A seventy-seven-year-old woman had a chronic atrial fibrillation (AFib) which is just a fancy way to say she had an irregular heartbeat that had lasted more than one week. The doctors had to stop her from taking anticoagulation medication temporarily to enable them to perform a spine surgery (another case). The doctors did not see any need to bridge the gap when she was not taking anticoagulants with low-molecular-weight heparin (another medication for preventing blood clot).

Well, a couple of days later, the woman noticed that her left hand moved across her field of viewing television, up her head, and stroked her hair and face. The hand did all that without any permission and exertion from the owner of the hand and continued to act with a mind of its own for the next thirty minutes. I know you think that it must be a medical condition but where I am from, if such a thing happened, there would be no doubt that it was an evil spirit or the intrigue of some ill-disposed kindred from her ancestral home (village _pipu_ :)). And don't even let her pastor hear it! Apparently her husband did not know anything about any of these evil machinations so he took her to the hospital.

Humans, by design do not have to think about a lot of things. For instance, do you think about how you move your arms and legs? I'm sure you do but the response of your hand to the instructions given to it by the brain is so automatic that it seems like the movement is involuntary but it is not involuntary; it couldn't be. Well, if your hand moves involuntarily, that's terrible news. You are not supposed to think about such things like, "Left leg forward..." even though you control them. And that control is critical because as Pirelli says, "Power without control is nothing". Now, imagine the power to move, without the control. Imagine that your left hand started moving itself, like raise the glass cup on your dining table and throw it against the wall! I would be scared shitless if my hand did that, and this is how people with alien hand syndrome suffer.

Alien hand syndrome is a condition where the limbs of a person move without their say-so and without them trying to move them. Luckily, it does not affect the whole limbs, and for some reasons yet unknown to us, it is usually the left hand. The hand may do a lot of things including grab an ass (how embarrassing, right?). In worse cases, it may even slap or try to choke the life out the owner. It does all these while the owner may be seeing a movie or eating or just chilling. In some cases, the person may even try to restain the fluttering hand with their controllable hand. This is the stuff of horror movies, I know.

In most cases, the person having this condition would be preoccupied with some other thing, and they don't realise what their hand is doing until they see it move or knock something down. When this happens, of course, it is natural to try and restrain the "evil" hand with the good hand. Such attempts have been known to fail too because the alien hand would overpower the good one. It should be apparent now that there is a total disconnection of the alien hand with the rest of the body and some patients with this condition would experience "intermanual conflict" which is a situation where the alien hand contradicts anything done by the good hand such as ruffling hairs that were patted down. This disconnectedness makes it seem like the hand has a life of its own, pursuing its own agenda. For this reason, alien hand patients would often treat the hand as a separate entity, different from them and they would often name it.

It sounds like a fascinating Tales by Moonlight until you put yourself in the position.

Imagine that one of your hands slaps you or punches you without warning, anytime it pleases or that as you are hurrying to leave to work in the morning, and one of your legs decides that it would rather go back home. To go, or not to go? Of course, you would end up turning round in cycles until the conflict is resolved. The cause of this condition is not known except that it comes from the brain and it is most common in people who have undergone surgery that involved the separation of the two hemispheres of the brain, known as corpus callosotomy. But why would someone want to go and cut their brains into two in the first place? I mean it is not like cleft chin or something.

Epilepsy

There is a social stigma attached to people who suffer epilepsy in my part of the world, and it is no wonder. Why won't you run away from someone who regularly has epileptic seizures, and falls on the ground, breaking bones and sustaining injuries especially since the cause is not well known? When I was growing up a girl in my school used to have these seizures, and one of our teachers instructed everyone to stay away from her whenever she had it because it "is infectious". But it was not infectious.

Epilepsy is one of a group of neurological disorders identified by epileptic seizures. These seizures could be short or can happen for long periods in which the individual would fall and shake vigorously as if he or she is being shocked with electric current. In most cases, the cause of epilepsy is not known. What is known is that the seizures result from an abnormal and excessive neuronal activity in the cortex of the bain. The identifiable causes are a stroke, brain tumours, brain injury and brain defects from birth known as epileptogenesis. There is no single test for epilepsy. Therefore, the diagnosis involves ruling out other conditions that may cause similar symptoms such as alcohol withdrawal and fainting.

As mentioned earlier, the treatment for extreme cases of epilepsy is a procedure, known as a corpus callosotomy. This involves physically severing the fibres that hold the left and right brain together (corpus callosum), and stopping the electrical signals that cause epileptic seizures. It must be mentioned that this method is only used in the treatment of medically refractive epilepsy. Unfortunately, this procedure may interfere with the way the brain communicates with the body parts, especially the limbs and this would cause problems of their own of which the alien hand syndrome is one. However, it should be noted that the procedure described above is not the only cause of the alien hand and any condition that can cause injury to the brain or result to the severance of the left and right brain, could cause alien hand syndrome.

But be of good cheer: alien hand syndrome is very rare and most reported cases are of old people like this. However, I thought you should know that it is possible for such things to happen without the involvement of any evil spirit or machinations of your village people :)

Conclusion

We may define Alien Hand Syndrome (AHS) or Dr Strangelove Syndrome (DSS) as unwilled, uncontrollable, but seemingly purposeful movements of an upper limb. Diagnosis is done through the complaint of an autonomous, complex and involuntary movement of the limb. The movement of the limb is disconnected from the motor functions of the individual and would often conflict with the actions of the other limb. The causes are not known except that they originate from the brain and may be caused by conditions that inflict injury on the brain.

Images Sources

Pixabay CC0
Wikimedia Commons: Dr Strangelove Peter Sellers
Wikipedia CC0

References

What do you think? Even if there is an injury in the brain resulting to AHS, why would that result to the hand slapping, punching and choking the patient instead of doing other things that are harmless to the individual?

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6 years ago in #stemng by churchboy (60)

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suckky (32) 6 years ago

I have not heard about the alien hand syndrome though its rare, its really nice to read about it here and thank you for taking your time to write extensively on it.