Dr. Margaret A. Patterson, MBE, MBChB, FRCS

1922 - 2002

Dr. Margaret (‘Meg’) Patterson was one of the youngest doctors to qualify from Aberdeen University and one of only a handful of early female surgeons. Her decision to specialise in general surgery was an unusual choice for women of the time, obstetrics and gynaecology being the expected career paths. Later in her career, while working in Hong Kong, she made an unexpected transition from surgery to the field of addiction, stumbling across the potential of a non-pharmacological approach to drug addiction treatment. Returning to England, she pioneered an innovative (and controversial) electro-stimulation detoxification system she named ‘NeuroElectric Therapy’ or NET. Following treatment of a number of musical luminaries, she became widely known as ‘the rock n’ roll doctor’.

Born Margaret Ingram in 1922, daughter of a railway official and youngest of five children, she grew up in the fishing port of Aberdeen in the north-east of Scotland. During her schooling at Aberdeen Central School (now Aberdeen Academy) she was Dux of the Year, the highest ranking student, four times. At the age of only sixteen she was accepted to read medicine at Aberdeen University. She was awarded First Prize in Surgery and graduated MB, ChB at the age of twenty-one - one of the youngest women ever to achieve this.

Meg Ingram’s initial surgical career was served during the hectic years of the Second World War, primarily in London, under the renowned surgeon Norman Tanner. With his encouragement she applied for and, at the age of twenty-five, was elected to the FRCS (Edinburgh), a lone woman amongst one hundred candidates, one of only twenty women who became Fellows (the first only in 1920), and the only one in General Surgery.

In 1948, encouraged by another Professor of Surgery, ‘Miss Ingram’ travelled to post-Independence India to work as a medical missionary. Over the next decade she held a number of surgical/teaching posts — establishing and expanding, with minimal resources, community hospitals and clinics — in the country’s north. In 1953 she met and married George Patterson, an explorer-writer, ‘China Watcher,’ and fellow missionary.

For her 'outstanding medical services' she was awarded the MBE in 1961.

In 1964 she moved to the Far East to be with her husband and was appointed Surgeon-in-Charge of the Surgical Unit, Tung Wah Hospital, Hong Kong. It was here, alongside her neurosurgical colleagues Dr.s Wen and Cheung, that in 1972 she made the serendipitous discovery that changed her life: that the application of electro-acupuncture analgesia — a Chinese system for surgical and post-surgical pain-control newly introduced into the British Colony — also significantly ameliorated opiate withdrawal symptomatology and craving.

The following year, aged fifty, convinced of the therapeutic significance of the treatment's electrical component and of its medical and social potential, she gave up surgery and returned to Britain to pursue clinical and scientific investigation into the development of NeuroElectric Therapy (NET) as a subtle, non-acupuncture, non-pharmacological intervention for drug addiction.

However, despite the successful treatment of many patients, the transition from surgeon to addiction doctor proved to be anything but straightforward. In 1974 a request for funding in order to carry out a full clinical investigation of NET was rejected by the UK’s Medical Research Council on the basis that, as she was not a psychiatrist (a requirement of the recent [Second] Brain Report in their call for trained addiction specialists), she was not therefore qualified to pursue such research. In the United Kingdom, at least, she never escaped her ‘outsider’ status.

Nevertheless she achieved international recognition as a pioneer in the new field of electro-medicine through the pursuit of clinical development and the scientific understanding of her treatment. In 1979 she was accorded a Visiting Professorship at University of Pennsylvania Addiction Research Center, USA.

Meg Patterson spent the next twenty-five years seeking to establish NET as a credible, scalable new treatment option for drug addicts wanting to rid themselves of their addiction.

Despite the many visible successes, it proved to be an uphill struggle with resistance to this relatively low cost, drug-free method of treatment coming from many quarters.

Her efforts to generate the scientific evidence, as well as the process of technological and commercial development required for wide acceptance of the treatment method, proved to be long, challenging, and prohibitively expensive. Sadly it was still not complete when, in 1999, she suffered a major stroke. After a pronged illness she died in 2002 at a nursing home in Scotland. Her husband, George Patterson, died in 2012.

Despite on-going controversy regarding the only partially-clarified scientific basis of her electrical technique, her peers in international addiction medicine honoured the ‘significant contribution’ she had made to the treatment of addiction.

Contrary to the occasional attention-grabbing ‘shock cure’ headline, and the baseless and fixated assertion by Wikipedia regarding Meg Patterson ‘… using electric shocks ...’ NET has always been mild and benign. Transcranial electrostimulation is used continuously for the first few days and is controlled by the user at an entirely subjective level of comfort. Furthermore, early in her investigations, Meg determined that any simultaneous use of a psychoactive medication (such as a sleeping pill) along with the electrostimulation merely reduced the efficacy of both — she therefore developed NET as a non-pharmacological alternative to traditional pharmacology-assisted withdrawal.

The objective of NET-supported detoxification continues to be to rapidly alleviate withdrawal symptomatology and craving so that issues underlying and reinforcing the addiction can be addressed without distraction.

Following her death her family have continued the evidence-generating process and a submission to the FDA of results from multi-centre clinical trials in Scotland and the USA is currently being prepared. Her treatment process based around NET-based detoxification is now attracting considerable interest from the Health Services and Criminal Justice Systems of a number of countries.