What’s Happening To Chronic Pain Patients? Very difficult times. Federal and state governments have belatedly recognized there’s an epidemic of prescription medications – which includes pain pills like opiates. Influenced by that epidemic, some academic opinion on how to treat pain has also reversed. Many researchers who believed pain patients should be treated for maximum […]
Doctor Versus Patient – The Case of Chronic Pain (6/25/12)
When Words Don’t Mean the Same Things to People If there are fifteen treatments for an illness, chances are good that many don’t work very well. That’s the case with chronic pain. Pain is really an information issue. The brain senses something is very awry. We then call that feeling pain. And our sense of […]
Supercharged breast implants (1/9/12)
Fuel Additives and Industrial Silicone What are fuel additives doing in breast implants? That’s the question asked by French national radio station RTL after a prominent toxicologist declared he discovered baysilone – sometimes used as fuel additive and lubricating grease – silopren and rhodorsil in the frequently rupturing 300,000 silicone implants made by Poly Implant […]
How your brain processes pain (2/25/11)
Does What You Expect Change What You Get? Pain is information, how the brain interprets certain stimuli to form sensations almost all humans fear and detest. As Oxford researchers reported last week in Science Translation Medicine, how we individually interpret pain is markedly changed by context: The Study Subjects – 22 healthy people Method – […]
Fibromyalgia, obesity, sleep and pain (1/14/11)
An Illness With Many Effects Too many people have fibromyalgia, perhaps up to 4% of Americans, but nobody knows why. Much controversy has followed work by Zahnle et al. who argued studies linking fibromyalgia with viruses like XMRV actually found nothing but artifacts, denying their results altogether. This has increased the public sense of murkiness […]