Neurosurgery resident here. MR-guided focused ultrasound is a rapidly spreading non-invasive approach to deep brain lesioning that is perfect for patients with fear of surgery or with significant comorbidities that heighten the risk of general anesthesia. The patients wear a frame similar to the one in the OP but there are no further incisions. They go home the same day. Questions remain regarding its durability of effect as compared to invasive electrode implantation but it is a hot topic for research.

I'm not by any means an expert in this, but I'm relatively confident that patients undergoing such procedures aren't going in drug-free. Something like diazepam at least. My mother had fully awake surgery on her eyes, and that's pretty much what they did. She was awake, but they gave her something that made her completely ambivalent about the procedure. Zero anxiety.

Yeah, I also got something and mine was for a back operation (not awake at all). It makes handling the patients a lot easier I guess.

I have something that does require this and I couldn't finish the article. I have no idea what I'm going to do.

I'm facing potentially fatal seizures or DBS.

I want to help. I can call you if you want, or offer my phone number for you to call me.

It's not bad. You don't feel ANYTHING. If you've ever been to the dentist and had a cavity filled then that is the extent of the horror. The sounds are no worse, just different.

There is no reason to suffer. Let's talk about this. (It's 23:15 Eastern, I'm going to bed soon. But we can also talk tomorrow.)

Here's the number you can reach me at: 313-524-1974

My name is Matt.

You are being a serious bro, Matt, and I commend you for it! But I would hate to see you get deluged by phone spam as a result. Please consider spelling out the letters of some of the digits in your phone number before it gets scraped.

I always wondered, years have gone by, haven't spammers figured out how to scrape numbers from all the little tricks we have done over the years? Maybe even a reverse GPT-4 type AI?

It's a voip number that I created just in case this person wants to talk. I can/will delete it if I start to get spam/abuse.

I've had a number of surgeries and in my experience they give you a number of sedatives before even wheeling you into the OR.

Not sure how many you would need to overcome deep seated phobia, but probably doable.

The hard part would be convincing you to go through with it.