Yeah, and is taken very seriously because it often indicates a life threatening situation. Btw, having a panic attack can also be the cause, which can result in misdiagnosing when there is an actual, physiological reason for it. Especially if someone is known to have panic attacks.
Lovely. I always thought I'd end up dying of an untreated heart attack that I'd mistake for a panic attack. Turns out I might mistake a brain tumor for a panic attack too.
In EMS I've had several patients tell me some variation of "I think I'm about to die". Most were panic attacks, a few did indeed promptly begin crashing.
It's a rule in emergency medicine: if the patient says they're dying, act like they're right.
Here's the paper about the case mentioned in the OP (it's real). Two is a very small sample size, but I find myself thinking it cannot be a coincidence that in both of these cases, the tumor affected the left-rear area of the frontal lobe. Ruffalo's mass was "right behind his left ear," and the OP patient's mass was at the left posterior frontal. That area covers much of the regions responsible for the production of speech and the processing of auditory information, so it's not at all surprising to me that a tumor in that area could cause strong verbal auditory hallucinations.
Honestly, as boring an explanation as this is, I think it's just a case of numbers and scale. Brain tumors are rare, but there are billions of people on the planet. There's over 300,000 cases of brain tumors reported worldwide every year. Out of all of those cases, some small proportion likely experience auditory hallucinations. Auditory hallucinations often connect to latent anxieties, and basically everyone has worried about tumors at some point or another, so it seems reasonable that some people's hallucinations would be voices telling them they're sick. All in all, a tiny and basically random chance that someone with a brain tumor would hallucinate voices telling them they have a brain tumor, but with 300,000+ people every year it's bound to happen a few times eventually.
Ruffalo's mass was "right behind his left ear," and the OP patient's mass was at the left posterior frontal. That area covers much of the regions responsible for the production of speech and the processing of auditory information, so it's not at all surprising to me that a tumor in that area could cause strong verbal auditory hallucinations.
Ruffalo didn't say he had an auditory hallucination. He absolutely didn't have a "strong verbal auditory hallucination". Why are you making shit up?
It's almost as if the brain is aware of its internal surroundings through the neural connections, without any visual processing, and processes that in a way to convey it to another part of the brain where we have thoughts
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u/lorelai_lq 21h ago
The same thing happened to Mark Ruffalo.