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To beat OCD, researchers used excrement (and it works)

HEALTH – The track is promising, without being particularly tasty. A team of American-British researchers published January 9 in the journal Frontiers in neuroscience a study opening up new horizons in the fight against obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). But the method has reason to hesitate, as you can find out in the video at the head of this article.

It is about confronting people obsessed with cleanliness, a particularly common OCD, with their worst anxiety, but in a roundabout way. For this, the scientists called upon a well-known experiment, “the illusion of the rubber hand”: a person places his hands on a table, one of the two is then hidden from him, and a rubber hand is asked instead. If you tickle both hands, the fake (apparent) and the real (hidden); the guinea pig will feel like the rubber hand is part of his body.

This true sensory magic trick, where vision and touch coordinate to redefine the limits of the body, has often taken on medical interest. Here, the neuroscientists have reproduced the experience, changing a parameter: after several minutes, the rubber hand is no longer tickled, but coated with … feces. Or rather a chocolate soft, sprinkled with a product that reminds you of the smell of excrement.

The 29 volunteers, all suffering from OCD, had the displeasure, when they had before this sight, of having their hidden hand rubbed with a wet handkerchief for several minutes. By the same association mechanism, everyone had the more or less strong impression that their hand was smeared with excrement. Unpleasant for many, but simply nightmarish for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

But by asking guinea pigs to note their disgust from 1 to 10, during and after the experiment, the researchers validated the hypothesis that a therapy going through this phenomenon could be particularly effective … and less traumatic in its application than usual therapies that attack OCD.

Being exposed to your phobia

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is indeed often treated by exposure therapy, of which this experience is a part: the patient to be treated is put in contact with his phobia, assisted by a therapist. But the traditional technique for being effective is often to put the patient’s body in direct contact with the object of their disgust: a step that many people with OCD fail to take.

With this ploy, neuroscientists somehow succeed in modulating the violence of exposure therapy, without losing the benefits, as the results of their study show. The subjects studied assimilate the rubber hand to their own hand, their disgust gradually increasing after five, then ten minutes, when the experiment ends.

It is then that the advantages of exposure therapy can apply: with the “habituation effect”, patients suffering from OCD and brought into contact with their phobia gradually lose their disgust when they have confronted, as demonstrated by numerous studies. If the study is scaled up, as the study authors hope, this amazing scheme could help treat many potty patients.

See also on The HuffPost: How does our brain react when fighting?

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