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Medicine Science

Lightning Struck Her Home. Then Her Brain Implant Stopped Working. (nytimes.com) 68

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Can lightning have an impact on people with electrodes implanted in their brains? A new study shares a case study. From a report: Lightning had struck the building. But the appliances were not the only things affected. After about an hour, the woman, who had had the electrodes put in five years before to help with debilitating muscle spasms in her neck, noticed her symptoms coming back. When she went to see her doctors the next day, they found that the pacemaker-like stimulator that powered the electrodes had switched itself off in response to the lightning strike.

In a study describing these events published Tuesday in the Journal of Neurosurgery, her doctors suggest that physicians and medical device companies add lightning strikes to the list of things patients with electrodes implanted in their brains should watch out for. It may sound futuristic, but deep brain stimulation, or D.B.S., has a fairly long history. Surgeons operating on epileptic patients in the 1930s and 1940s found that removing small portions of the brain could quiet seizures. Later, researchers found that stimulating certain brain areas, instead of cutting them out, could quell the involuntary movements characteristic of Parkinson's and other disorders.
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Lightning Struck Her Home. Then Her Brain Implant Stopped Working. More

Lightning Struck Her Home. Then Her Brain Implant Stopped Working.

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  • is it happy hour yet (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03, 2018 @02:27PM (#56548518)

    this story isnt about facebook so i dont know why its on slashdot

    • Sorry, It slipped though. Sorry for the actual technical content not about social media and personal security.

    • It does have a shitty, click bait headline phrasing though and would fit in on Facebook.

  • Slow news day? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Higaran ( 835598 ) on Thursday May 03, 2018 @02:27PM (#56548526)
    So her home was struck by lightning, and it fried everything, even some highly advance stuff implanted in her body. Do people not realize how much power in in a bolt of lightning? The woman is probably lucky her house didn't burn down, i know that homes have lightning rods and what not, but I've see some massive damage to homes that are struck.

    • Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 ) on Thursday May 03, 2018 @02:38PM (#56548626)

      Do people not realize how much power in in a bolt of lightning?

      1.21 gigawatts!?!?!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      I think the surprising thing about it to some people is that the device was not one that was plugged in, and yet it was still affected.

      • LOL.. You DO understand that the issue was the voltages involved. IF you give me a wire that touches the right nerves, I can shut down your heart with a AA battery...

        My guess is the medical device has fail safe settings built in, so if it sees any voltages or currents that exceed some pretty narrow limits on it's terminals, it immediately isolates everything and shuts down. They do this as a last resort to keep a malfunctioning device from doing harm to a patient. A nearby lighting strike could easily t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mark-t ( 151149 )

          I was suggesting that it might be surprising to some people on account of the fact that it was not plugged in and you give an example that explicitly requires physical contact.

          I fail to see the relevance of your argument to what I said.

          • I'm saying an implanted device will be working on very low voltages and currents. Thus, it's entirely possible that a lighting strike near by to induce enough of a surge, even in a device not wired to something else, to activate a device's fail safe system.

            You don't have to be directly connected to anything to have issues with lighting surges. If you are very close, induced currents from magnetic or electric fields associated with the huge currents involved in a lighting strike can be pretty large.

      • I think the surprising thing about it to some people is that the device was not one that was plugged in, and yet it was still affected.

        This should not be a surprise. Hospitals worry a lot about the EM radiation from mobile phones affecting their delicate medical instruments. I think most people would be aware that the EM emission from lightning is going to be a bit more powerful than your typical mobile!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • umm.. duh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Thursday May 03, 2018 @02:32PM (#56548564)
    Years ago I had a talking Stitch doll (from Lilo and Sititch) that you could "talk" to and it would respond to simple questions. You could turn it on by pressing a leaf switch in his ear or it would listen for voice commands directed to him. Very cool, geeky toy, left it on the shelf and the batteries died and he stopped talking.
    Until one night, had a bad thunderstorm and a lightning strike very close to the house (less than a second between lightning flash and thunder) lights flickered, static on the TV...
    Almost immediately after, Stitch, on the shelf, said "I'm having a pretty good day".
    Cue twilight zone music.

    • did you make sure the switch on its back was not set to 'evil' ?

      I'd be worried my friend.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      Heh. We had some kind of kid's toy duck that would quack. I forget exactly what triggered it, but it only made noise when either squeezed or moved or some kind of interaction. About 3 a.m. one night it gave a random quack from the bathroom, even though hit hadn't been touched in days. After it did it a couple of times over the span of a week, I think we got rid of it, just because we didn't want to keep being woken up.

  • As opposed to.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stormy Dragon ( 800799 ) on Thursday May 03, 2018 @02:41PM (#56548650)

    her doctors suggest that physicians and medical device companies add lightning strikes to the list of things patients with electrodes implanted in their brains should watch out for

    Have physicians and medical device companies been recommending people in general seek out lightning strikes?

    • Not in general, but some of "those" patients got that exact advice

    • Only since the late 1800's [wikipedia.org].

    • Re:As opposed to.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Thursday May 03, 2018 @03:16PM (#56548940)

      Have physicians and medical device companies been recommending people in general seek out lightning strikes?

      That would be a rather shocking revelation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )
      And what exactly is a person supposed to do when they're watching out during a thunderstorm? Hide behind the toilet with the dog?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Calydor ( 739835 )

        Or be aware that a nearby lightning strike can fry their implant, and if they feel ANYTHING remotely similar to their old symptoms during or after a thunderstorm to seek medical help immediately instead of writing it off as nerves, being tired or whatever.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bigtiny ( 236798 )

      so heart patients with pacemakers should 'look out' for lightening strikes. What the hell does THAT mean??? Does somebody carry a cheap 'predictive lightening strike detector' that I haven't heard about?!?!

    • A medical device company spokesperson was heard to say he's thunderstruck at such an unmitigated misrepresentation.

  • A lot of these devices don't seem finished when you compare them to general consumer devices. I might forgive no security but often they handle error conditions incorrectly and don't even give an indication of a problem. For example radiation counters that say no radiation when their sensor becomes saturated. Or devices that will after a power interruption join the first network that they find and just wait for commands (802.15.4 medical monitors joining ZigBee meter networks). I've also seen devices that as far as I can tell where never tested in the real world before being used (pager based patient room transfer systems - besides no security and broadcasting your private information, pager uses a detect n and correct m error correcting algorithm where n=m, so if the bit error exceeds n then you get the wrong message with no indication)

  • EMPs [wikipedia.org]?
    Microwaves (as used in The Pentagons latest iteration of their recently revealed ray gun [slashdot.org])?

    Same question applies for pacemakers and no doubt more things as technology advances, we age and augment (Cybermen [wikipedia.org] anyone?)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What if she were hit by the Pentagon's Ray Gun?

      That depends on the mass of the ray gun and its velocity when it hit her, it would probably leave a bruise.

  • Are they somehow protected form EMP from nearby lightening strikes? Turning of the pacemaker might not be too bad for the patient, though I don't know, but making it create other kinds of heart beat problems could be fatal.

  • Clickbaity headline is clickbaity. (Score:3)

    by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Thursday May 03, 2018 @06:48PM (#56550654)

    Lightning Struck Her Home. Then Her Brain Implant Stopped Working.

    You'll be amazed at what happened next!

  • doctors suggest that physicians and medical device companies add lightning strikes to the list of things patients with electrodes implanted in their brains should watch out for.

    Shouldn't everyone "watch out for lightning strikes?

  • Lightning is powerful. Even if you don't have electronics in your brain, or elsewhere in your body, you're still at risk of significant damage. I was struck by the stray side bolts of lightning. It shut me down and caused all my muscles to contract. My daughter and wife who saw it happened said that lightning bolts were shooting out of my hands. I have no memory of that. I remember my fists hitting my chest hard as my biceps contracted and my legs flexing so I tipped over. Other than that it was all whiteou

  • If you're the producer of an implant, would you rather want said implant, which manages some of a patient's muscles, when affected by nearby lightning strikes or defibrillator, to
    A) malfunction
    or
    B) shut down

    A could be potentially cause accidents, and in turn, lawsuits.
    B might an annoyance to a patient, when they have to go have it reactivated.

    I think they made a wise choice.

  • Lightning Struck Her Home. Then Her Brain Implant Stopped Working.

    Next up: Improve your headlines with this one trick!

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