24 | HealthLinksSC.com DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION REVOLUTIONIZES TREATMENT In the summer of 2011, when U.S. resident Yoheved Hasson began feeling involuntary shaking in her left leg, she soon learned from a local neurologist that she had Parkinson’s disease. Several years later, after trying prescription medications and other treatments to no avail, she was told by doctors that her only hope for recovery was an experimental procedure called deep brain stimulation. Using this method, doctors would attempt to surgically reach into the part of her brain that had triggered the Parkinson’s and deliver an electrical impulse to change the course of the illness and return Hasson to normal. “I was nervous, but my doctor told me it was the only option we had left,” Hasson said. Her treatment was performed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles – and, so far, she has been free of any sign of Parkinson’s. But if brain stimulation might be an option to help you recover from Parkinson’s or another chronic illness, you don’t have to go all the way to the West Coast. At the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, researchers not only run the state’s only comprehensive brain stimulation center, they continue to pioneer efforts to help people like Hasson overcome Parkinson’s and an array of other illnesses and mental health conditions. “Brain stimulation is revolutionary in psychiatric care,” said Edward Baron Short, M.D., director of the Brain Stimulation Service at MUSC. “And as treatments are starting to spread throughout South Carolina, MUSC remains the top in expertise and innovation for brain stimulation care.” For example, MUSC physicians were the first to use a variety of brain stimulation treatments for depression, obsessive By L. C. Leach III
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