More on propranolol – the drug that doesn’t erase memories

The mainstream media are just queuing up to fail in their reporting of the propranolol story from a couple of days ago. To reiterate:

Propranolol is commonly used to treat high blood pressure and prevent migraines in children. But Merel Kindt and colleagues from the University of Amsterdam have found that it can do much more. By giving it to people before they recalled a scary memory about a spider, they could erase the fearful response it triggered.

The critical thing about the study is that the entire memory hadn’t been erased in a typical sci-fi way. Kindt had trained the volunteers to be fearful of spidery images by pairing them with electric shocks. Even after they’d been given propranolol, they still expected to receive a shock when they saw a picture of a spider – they just weren’t afraid of the prospect. The drug hadn’t so much erased their memories, as dulled their emotional sting. It’s more like removing all the formatting from a Word document than deleting the entire file.

The drug is not a “memory-wiping pill” (Guardian). It cannot “erase bad/painful memories” (Sun/ Fox News/ Metro/ Daily Mail) and it won’t give you a “spotless mind” (Scotsman). Perhaps it’s unsurprising given that massive wire agencies said similar things. The Press Association led with claims that the drug can “erase fearful memories“. Reuters at least said more cautiously that it was a “step towards erasing bad memories“.

To quote the person who actually did the research (and thanks Merel for chiming in on the earlier post): 

“There was no memory erasure, just elimination of the fearful response.”

The problem with all of this, of course, is that people have straw-manned the research and are falling over themselves to publish trite editorials that (a) are irrelevant to the actual study and (b) serve to stoke public outrage over an ethical dilemma of their own concoction.

There are exceptions. The Boston Globe got it right and has a brilliant bit at the end that lays out in four simple sentences the bottom line, cautions, what’s next, and where the research was published. It has however accompanied the article with an incongruous photo of a koala, presumably some sort of mix-up with the Australian bushfire story.

The mental health charity MIND released a long and well-considered statement, which showed that they had actually read the paper and understood the science. The charity’s CEO, Paul Farmer, said:

“This is fascinating research that could transform the treatment for phobias and post traumatic stress disorder. Around 10 million people in the UK have a phobia and about 3.5% of the population will be affected by post traumatic stress disorder at some point yet our understanding of how to treat these conditions is still limited. While we welcome any advancement in this field we should also exercise caution before heralding this as a miracle cure.

“Eradicating emotional responses is clearly an area we would need to be very careful about. It could affect people’s ability to respond to dangerous situations in the future and could even take away people’s positive memories. We would not want to see an ‘accelerated Alzheimer’s’ approach.

“We still have limited research on how to treat complex mental health problems, with the focus often on pharmacological solutions. Drugs are a somewhat sledgehammer approach and can have unintended consequences. We know from other psychiatric drugs, for example antipsychotics and antidepressants, that individuals react in hugely varied ways to treatments and are often vulnerable to unpleasant side effects.

“We would need to see much more research into the risks and benefits into this treatment before it becomes a reality.”

All of that was culled by the BBC into the following:

But British experts questioned the ethics of tampering with the mind.

Paul Farmer, chief executive of mental health charity Mind, said he was concerned about the “fundamentally pharmacological” approach to people with problems such as phobias and anxiety.

He said the procedure might also alter good memories and warned against an “accelerated Alzheimer’s” approach.

Do you think it carries the same meaning or sense?