Sound Waves, Not Surgery, Repair a Broken Brain
▼ Summary
– Erin McNulty, a 45-year-old with a long history of substance use starting in high school, was missing for weeks while her mother Linda searched for her.
– Linda discovered a 60 Minutes segment featuring a non-invasive ultrasound procedure for addiction, developed by neurosurgeon Ali Rezai at West Virginia University.
– The ultrasound treatment targets deep brain structures without surgery, takes 20 minutes, and allows patients to go home the same day.
– Linda, determined to get Erin help, planned to travel over 600 miles to West Virginia despite not yet finding her daughter.
– West Virginia has the highest overdose death rate in the US, and Rezai moved there to address the addiction crisis despite colleagues warning it would hurt his career.
Erin McNulty had vanished, and her mother was running on fumes. Linda had already put in her usual seven-day week at the antiques shop near Burlington, Vermont, and spent every free evening driving around, searching for her daughter. Erin, then 45, had been caught in the grip of methamphetamine for years.
The addiction had deep roots. It started in high school with alcohol, moved to marijuana, and eventually settled into heroin, a path her brother also followed. When Linda discovered what was happening, she began driving her children three hours to a methadone clinic in Massachusetts. The treatment worked, but it left Erin exhausted, so she turned to cocaine to stay awake. There were periods of sobriety, including one long enough for Erin to have her daughter in 2008. The family took trips to the Great Escape waterpark in New York and Hampton Beach in New Hampshire. But there were also overdoses and stints in rehab. Erin eventually switched to suboxone and kicked heroin, but when a friend introduced her to meth, Linda says, “Erin was gone.”
One evening, Linda sat down in her living room and flipped on the TV. A 60 Minutes segment caught her eye. It was early 2024, and the show was profiling a new approach to treating substance use disorders. The idea was simple on its face: beam ultrasound through the skull to reset the brain. Researchers at West Virginia University were testing it on people with Alzheimer’s disease and addiction. Linda thought of her daughter immediately.
The neurosurgeon leading the work, Ali Rezai, had built his career on deep brain stimulation, a technique that requires cutting into the skull to implant electrodes deep in the brain. He was fascinated by the possibility that ultrasound, the same technology used to image fetuses during pregnancy, could reach those same structures without breaking the skin. No drilling, no tissue damage. The entire procedure could be done in 20 minutes, and patients would walk out the same day.
Linda couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She shouted for her teenage granddaughter, Erin’s daughter, to come watch. “Look at this doctor,” she said. “They’re fixing people!” The trial was more than 600 miles away, but that didn’t matter. She was going to get Erin to West Virginia. First, she had to find her.
Rezai’s path to this work was anything but direct. Born in Iran, raised in Los Angeles, and trained as a neurosurgeon in New York, he never planned to settle in Appalachia. “My colleagues said, ‘You’re committing academic suicide,'” he recalls. But he saw West Virginia as the perfect proving ground for new treatments, given its status as the epicenter of the US addiction crisis. Nearly 45 million Americans meet the criteria for a substance use disorder, and while overdose deaths have fallen for three straight years, there were still almost 70,000 in 2025. West Virginia leads the nation in overdose deaths per capita, at more than double the national average.
(Source: Wired)
