Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, “A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices.” BMJ Clinical Research 315 (7123), 1685-1686. December 1997.
This is the first article in an ongoing series on strange things that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Here, we’ll look at a case in which a woman was — apparently — accurately diagnosed with a brain tumor by ghosts.
Azuonye reports a healthy European woman in her late 30s or early 40s in good health. In late 1984, while sitting in her home and reading, the patient heard — apparently abruptly and with no forewarning, a voice in her head. It said:
“Please don’t be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you.”
The patient, Azuonye reports, was aware of the hospital “but did not know where it was and had never visited it.” The voice continued. To prove to the woman that it was sincere, it gave her “three pieces of information, which she did not possess at the time.” Frustratingly, Azuonye does not tell us what this information was, only that the patient checked them out and found them to be indeed true. Nevertheless, she believed she was having some kind of psychiatric episode. She visited her doctor, who referred her (“urgently”) to Azuonye, then at a psychiatric clinic.
Azuonye diagnosed hallucinatory psychosis and prescribed thioridizine with counseling. The voices disappeared not long after, but returned in force when the patient was on vacation, and while she was still taking the antipsychotics. They instructed her to head home immediately, as she needed urgent treatment for “something wrong with her.” We are told that “she was also having other beliefs of a delusional nature,” but again we are not told what they are.
She saw Azuonye again, but by this time the voices had told her that she had a brain tumor. They had also given her a specific address that she was to go to, which turned out to be the computerized tomography section of an unnamed hospital in London. It turns out that it’s not easy to get a CT scan of your brain because ghosts told you to, and Azuonye had to work to convince the hospital to perform the scan in the absence of any medical justification. He writes that this was strictly to reassure his patient, as he had examined her and found no signs of a tumor. He is insistent about this: in the postscript to the article he repeats that “there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the the tumour.”
They found a tumor. Specifically, they found a meningioma. The neurosurgeon reported no apparent neurological symptoms, and carried out an immediate surgery — with, it should be noted, the full approval of the voices. When she awoke from the succesful surgey, the voices spoke once more:
We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.
The patient made a full recovery. She was immediately taken off the antipsychotics and, at the time of the article’s writing 12 years after the surgey, had experienced no further hallucinatory voices or delusions.