Botulinum toxin, the deadly nerve poison that inhibits the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, has many cosmetic uses these days. In extremely small quantities, it cancels facial tics, erases forehead worry-lines, and so on. The effect lasts for weeks or months, until the toxin decays; repeated treatments can be permanent. Daedalus sees psychiatric implications. The brain is the repository of many inappropriate or downright harmful reflexes, memories and sensory illusions. They could well be eliminated, if only we knew where they were stored.

Acupuncture and reflexology both claim that the whole body is mapped onto the skin surface. They work, if they do, by 'gating' nerves from the skin, launching signals that interfere with or override messages from the organs being treated. Nerves are tubes. Once inside a nerve, a virus or small particle is safe from immunological surveillance. Rabies, inflicted by the bite of a rabid animal, injects a virus at the bite site that slowly ascends the local nerve and then multiplies in the brain. So Daedalus will inject botulinum toxin into an acupunctural or reflexological skin location, chosen under psychiatric examination, and hope that it travels to the site of the psychiatric trouble. Unlike a virus, the toxin will not multiply and spread. Thus, to eliminate a troublesome memory the patient will recall it in detail, and the therapist will find which area of skin has been sensitized. Indeed, even if the patient cannot recall the memory (it may have been repressed), a sensitized area of skin should act as an indicator.

The toxin will be injected into the nerve as microencapsulated particles. By the time the encapsulation decays, the toxin should be on site. With luck the particles will slowly ascend that nerve alone, and travel exactly to that part of the brain concerned with the chosen memory. The process may take some time; but many psychiatric drugs also take a long time to act.

Psychiatry should be made much more precise. Bad memories, complexes, illusions such as tinnitus, each could be addressed exactly and removed without interfering with anything else. Even better, the effect should decay in a month or two with the toxin. The therapist will thus learn what other mental effects depend on the eliminated symptom. Repeated treatments could then be targeted more exactly.