Brain Scan: Also called neuroimaging or brain imaging. The use of various techniques to produce an image of the structure, function or other aspects of the brain.
Many different electrical, magnetic, chemical, x-ray, optical, ultrasound, and radioactive techniques can be used to visualize different brain features. As scientific endeavors to find out more about how the brain works, these are certainly interesting; perhaps even medically useful.
What isn’t so useful is the psychiatric obsession with the brain as the source of mental disorders; or worse yet, as a target for surgical, electrical, magnetic, or chemical manipulation based on the flimsiest of guesses about how the brain actually works.
Knowing nothing about the underlying causes of serious mental disturbance, psychiatry still sears the brain with electroshock, tears it with psychosurgery and deadens it with dangerous drugs.
Many brain scan studies cannot be reproduced or scientifically validated. Yet sensationalist psychiatric public relations tout claims only meant to sell the latest drug or other “treatment.”
Legitimate scientists and the media are now starting to question the hype. Troubling evidence continues to surface about defective research methods, challenging scores of “revelations” about how the brain works.
In fact, there is flatly no scientific evidence showing a definitive link between brain scans and mental disorders. In a study published in Nature (20 May 2020), 70 teams of neuroimaging researchers analyzed the same brain scan data, looking to verify the same nine hypotheses about the results. Every single team picked a different way to analyze the data, and their results varied wildly.
In short, Brain Scans in psychiatry are really Brain Scams.
