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Insulin coma therapy: let's be factual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Harold Bourne*
Affiliation:
Charing Cross Hospital, London, and Medico Chirurgo, Rome, Italy, email: drhbourne@gmail.com
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Abstract

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Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2014

There are factual errors in Dr Alan Gibson's letter in the August 2014 issue. Reference Gibson1 By the time he worked, as he says, in the ‘intellectual giant’, Martin Roth's insulin unit, 1956–1959, my two papers which showed there was, over 20 years, no serious evidence for insulin coma being of any value in schizophrenia – ‘The insulin myth’ Reference Bourne2 and ‘Insulin coma in decline’ Reference Bourne3 – had both been published and were being acted upon worldwide. However, Roth in his psychiatry textbook in 1961, a few years later, made no mention of any of this but actually still continued to advocate insulin coma therapy as if there were nowhere any doubts about it.

However, I was indebted to Martin Roth for sponsoring my resolution at the World Psychiatric Association in 1973 to expel the Soviet Association for permitting the imprisonment of political dissidents in Soviet mental hospitals.

References

1 Gibson, A. Insulin coma therapy. Psychiatr Bull 2014; 38: 198.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
2 Bourne, H. The insulin myth. Lancet 1953; 2: 964.Google Scholar
3 Bourne, H. Insulin coma in decline. Am J Psychiatry 1958; 114: 1015.Google Scholar
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