insulin shock treatment
- noun
- /ˈɪnsəˌlɪn ʃɑk ˈtritmənt/
- Archaic
:
tratamiento de shock insulínico
- Insulin shock treatment, which also produced a convulsion, was still being used in the treatment of schizophrenia in Europe when I was stationed there in the early 1960s.
Examples
-
She's been getting insulin shock treatments...
-
I could give her insulin shock treatment.
-
In the past, doctors sometimes used insulin shock treatment to help patients with severe mental illnesses.
-
During the 1950s, insulin shock treatment was a common therapy for individuals suffering from schizophrenia.
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Some psychiatrists administered insulin shock treatment as a last resort for patients who did not respond to other therapies.
Synonyms
8
5.1
A treatment that uses electric shocks to treat severe mental illness
4
5.8
A medical procedure that uses electric shocks to the brain to help severe mental illness
1
7.2
A severe effect or treatment using too much insulin that causes uncontrolled shaking and coma
A past treatment for mental illness that used large insulin doses to cause fits and coma
A medical treatment from the past that gave injections to cause strong seizures to treat mental illness
A medical treatment using Metrazol to cause seizures and coma
A medical treatment that uses a drug to cause seizures and coma
How Extreme
- Archaic
- Specialized
1
6.5
- Specialized
1
6.2
- Specialized
24
5.8
Surface Forms
Morphology
The components 'insulin' + 'shock' + 'treatment' do cue that this is a medical procedure using insulin to produce a shock-like state, so a learner who knows the words can infer a general idea. However the precise clinical sense — deliberately inducing convulsions/coma as a historical psychiatric therapy and the specialized medical sense of 'shock' here — is specific and not fully predictable from the parts, making the expression only partially transparent.
Etymology
Insulin shock treatment comes from a medical practice where doctors gave large doses of insulin to make patients have seizures or fall into a coma. This sudden shock to the body was thought to help severe 'mental illness', so the name describes what the treatment did.