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Post by Frenchie on Apr 26, 2009 15:49:31 GMT 1
An Australian father-of-three who had hated his right leg for 25 years told Sunday how he plunged it in a bucket of dry ice for six hours so surgeons at a Sydney hospital had no choice but to amputate below the knee.
"I'm tired of lying all the time and I just want people to know I'm not crazy," David Openshaw, 29, told Channel Seven in his first television interview since losing the limb last year.
Openshaw said he has a rare neurological condition called body integrity identity disorder (BIID), which sufferers claim is a medical condition characterised by an overwhelming desire to lose a limb or become a paraplegic.
Other BIID sufferers have used the dry ice technique to bring on a hospital amputation. An unknown number mutilate themselves or find backstreet surgeons willing to do the job for them.
Though there are thousands of people around the world like Openshaw who claim to have BIID, many psychologists refuse to recognise it as a genuine identity trait.
There is only one case of a doctor agreeing to cut off the limb of a BIID sufferer.
In 2000 Scottish surgeon Robert Smith performed several amputations at the Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary before he was ordered to stop. He argued that his patients would have taken their own lives unless he met their demands for an amputation.
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