What is shock?

What Does shock Mean

The term shock is not part of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ). The concept, which comes from the English language, can be understood as “shock” and is used frequently in the field of medicine .

In this way, we can speak of a septic shock . It is a serious condition that a person suffers when they have hypotension for a prolonged period and suffer an oxygen deficiency as a result of sepsis . Septic shock can cause multi-organ failure resulting in the death of the patient.
A hemorrhagic shock , on the other hand, occurs when the level of blood circulating through the body drops to a point where the heart can no longer pump the amount of blood that the body requires to function. In this way, the cells do not receive the blood flow they need and the organs begin to fail.

The electroconvulsive therapy , also known as electroshock , is to apply electricity to a patient under psychiatric treatment. Due to its side effects and risks, electroshock is only used in certain cases of schizophrenia, catatonia or acute depression, when the person does not respond to other kinds of treatments.
This concept is also known by the name of shock therapy or shock , and is applied in cases of health of mind that can not be solved by the most accepted methods. It is important to note that not all health professionals are in favor of this path to try to cure a disease, in part due to the failed cases that have been reported throughout history, with serious consequences due to a bad application.
It all begins when the patient presents a condition of a certain severity, which seems to resist the most modern and less risky treatments. Through a controlled electric shock it is possible to induce a particular physiological state that gives rise to the change that the patient needs. Simply put, it should never be an initial resource, but rather one used when no one else has produced the desired results.
While acute depression is one of the first disorders on the list of problems that can be treated by shock therapy, we should not overlook the phobias that are generally associated with schizophrenia and bipolarity. The state that induces the electric shock is clearly artificial, although it is classified as a seizure; in fact, there is talk of electroconvulsive therapy , a treatment that may seem too dangerous but that many people undergo quite frequently, such as once a month.

One of the reasons for the great controversy surrounding this therapy is that the first psychiatrists to administer it made serious mistakes and left many patients in deplorable states, with cognitive losses impossible to repair or even in a vegetative state. Despite the fact that history taints this treatment with so much negativity, scientific advances promise a much lower degree of risk and that is why so many people continue to resort to it.
In more technical terms, shock therapy used in the field of psychiatry produces certain changes in the neurochemistry of the brain to reverse the symptoms of some diseases that are very difficult to treat by other means. It requires the work of an anesthetist and several nurses in addition to the doctor, so that the patient is constantly under control.
The notion of shock is also used as a synonym for shock or shock . For example: "I am in shock: the neighbor on the fifth floor committed suicide by throwing himself from his bedroom window" , "The resignation of the president shocked the population" , "Being world champion was a shock" .

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