Amputee Wannabes

If a person wants to have a healthy limb amputated, should that medical procedure be performed? That sounds like a bizarre question - after all, who would want such a thing? As a matter of fact, doctors and psychologists are beginning to acknowledge that there is a surprisingly significant number of people who suffer from something called apotemnophilia, the desire to see themselves become amputees and who are attracted (often sexually) to the idea of amputation.

Most doctors refuse to amputate a healthy limb. So strong is the desire for amputation, however, that many will go to great lengths to ensure that it happens — for example damaging their arm of leg through freezing or gunshots to make sure that it is unsalvageable. Such actions, of course, carry many additional risks such as death. This, then, leads to an ethical conundrum for doctors: it may be unethical to amputate a healthy limb, but is it ethical to let a person go and risk killing themselves in the process of making the limb unhealthy?

Of course, merely by reporting on this I myself am taking an ethical risk — the more information that is disseminated about this, the greater the chance that there may be an increase in this behavior. Paraphilias are at least as much social as they are psychological. As reported by Slate:

Anyone with a rudimentary familiarity with the history of psychiatry cannot help but be struck by the way that mental disorders come and go. Conditions like social anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, gender identity disorder, multiple personality disorder, anorexia, and chronic fatigue syndrome were once seen as rare or nonexistent, then suddenly they ballooned in popularity. This is not simply because people decided to “come out” rather than suffer alone. It is because all mental disorders, even those with biological roots, have a social component.

Of course, that is no reason not to talk about it — but it is a reason to take a great deal of care when discussing it.

 

Quick Poll: What should doctors do when confronted by someone who wants a healthy limb amputated?

1. Refuse and sent them to a mental health specialist.
2. Amputate, but only if there is strong reason to think that they will risk death to make their limb unhealthy and only after psychiatric treatment fails.
3. Amputate the limb - the customer (patient) is always right.
4. I don't know.
5. I don’t care.

Click an option to vote, or View Current Poll Results