Her Brain Was Broken. It Was Fixed With Sound—Not a Scalpel
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A woman named Erin McNulty struggled with meth addiction for years, trying various treatments without success. Her mother, Linda, discovered a noninvasive ultrasound procedure being tested at West Virginia University that showed promise in treating addiction. The procedure, led by neurosurgeon Ali Rezai, uses focused ultrasound to target the brain without surgery, and it appeared to help Erin after a single session.
- ▪Erin McNulty had been using methamphetamine for years and had tried various treatments, including methadone and suboxone, without lasting success.
- ▪A noninvasive ultrasound procedure being tested at West Virginia University showed promise in treating addiction by targeting the brain without surgery.
- ▪Neurosurgeon Ali Rezai, who has performed over 3,000 deep brain stimulation surgeries, is leading the research on using ultrasound to treat addiction.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | WIRED |
| Canonical URL | https://www.wired.com/story/brain-focused-ultrasound/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-14T11:49:39.997Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-14T11:49:39.997Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Emily MullinThe Big StoryAug 14, 2026 6:00 AMHer Brain Was Broken. It Was Fixed With Sound—Not a ScalpelOne woman’s meth addiction was so bad, the only option left might have been brain surgery. Then a single session of noninvasive, focused ultrasound seemed to do what years of treatment could not.Animation: Balarama HellerCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyErin McNulty had been missing for weeks when her mother, Linda, sat down on a chair in her living room, exhausted. Linda had put in her usual seven-day workweek at the antiques shop she runs near Burlington, Vermont. She’d spent her free evenings driving around, trying to track down her daughter.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at WIRED.
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