In 2018, the FDA chose to require the following mandatory warning statement be posted near all ECT devices:

"The long-term safety and effectiveness of ECT treatment has not been demonstrated, and long-term follow-up may be needed." 

Unfortunately, it didn't detail what long-term consequences were...and so patients and their family members aren't told what ECT does to their brain and body, nor are they warned about long-term consequences. 

A new study out of Turkey just identified that ECT increases oxidative DNA damage. 

Perhaps it's time to consider what happens to the body when it's marinated in oxidative stress from DNA damage: it slowly erodes the body's capacity to function! ECT researchers like Peter Breggin referred to ECT injury as causing "global dysfunction."

There's a reason people who study Electrical Injury refer to it as an ionizing injury. It's effects are akin to irradiating injury! It slowly erodes the body. 

Doctors aren't required to understand how ECT impacts the body long-term which is why when ECT patients begin developing the baffling symptoms of "delayed electrical injury" causing motor neuron dysfunction, vascular dysfunction, and demyelination of the entire brain, spinal cord and nervous system, Doctors aren't prepared to help provide the long-term follow-up recommend by the FDA. Instead they will either tell patients they're imagining their symptoms or astute Drs will acknowledge electrical injury is outside their scope of practice and tell patients to go find an electrical injury specialist... problem is there are only about eight in the entire world! Good luck with that! 

It's time all Doctors be trained in the long-term consequences of pulsed high electric fields so that patients with a history of ECT and other treatments using pulsed high electric fields (TMS) have a fighting chance to improve quality of life after treatment. 

Marinating the body in oxidative stress has consequences for which NO ONE is prepared! The more treatments a person has, the more catastrophic the consequences.  But ECT has no safety testing on record with the FDA, nor does it have dosing limits based on safety studies. Is it any question why Dr. John Read and Harvard's associate director of placebo studies concluded that ECT use should be suspended until randomized controlled placebo studies which meet modern clinical parameters are conducted?  

Long-term consequences are real. I'm living evidence of the neurological sequelea of low voltage electrical injury. It's not pretty. 

Doctors have a moral, ethical obligation to warn patients about long-term consequences and their inability to provide long-term follow-up as recommended by the FDA.

We deserve better care!