“I Am Not In Pain’ Coma Patient!

A patient who is in a vegetative state conveyed that he is not in pain.!

The Doctors seem to have interpreted the brain waves to arrive at this conclusion.

If this is correct, then the concept of Euthanasia  in the case of Coma Patients need to have a re-look into, as these cases are recommended on the assumption that the Coma patients are in pain.

A patient is prepared for an MRI in a file photo. The medical advancement is being touted as the first of its kind in the world. It happened last June when doctors in London, Ont., used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) to analyze brain activity patterns in Scott Routley.
Photograph by: Miguel Alvarez , AFP/Getty Images

Story:

For more than a decade, Scott Routley has been living in a vegetative state.

He can’t talk. He can’t move. And although his eyes are open, no one is sure whether he can see.

But now, for the first time, doctors caring for the 39-year-old London, Ont., man say they know he’s not in pain.

And they learned it from Routley himself, by analyzing his brain waves when they asked him.

“This was a landmark moment for us because for the first time, a patient can actually tell us information, important information about how they’re feeling and their current situation,” said lead researcher Dr. Adrian Owen on Tuesday.

The medical breakthrough, believed to be the only time a severely brain injured patient has been able to relay clinically relevant information to their doctors, is being touted as a new way to possibly improve their quality of care.

Owen, who is the head of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario, says research published online last year in The Lancet shows that one in five of these patients are conscious, but essentially trapped in their bodies because they’re unable to communicate verbally or physically.

His team has been working for the past year trying to determine whether Routley, who became vegetative following a car crash 12 years ago, had any “residual brain activity” and how much he was able to understand them.

Last June, the doctors employed a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) to see if they would be able to analyze his brain patterns.

 http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Breakthrough%20lets%20Canadian%20vegetative%20state%20communicate%20with/7540940/story.html#ixzz2CB4Bbwbv

Why People See Sound?

I have often heard of people seeing Sound, especially when they are engrossed in Listening to Music.

Other case relate to other circumstances.

Why do some people see sounds?

Story:

Seeing Sound.

Past experiments revealed there are strong differences between individuals when it comes to how prone they are to this illusion. “Some would experience it almost every time a flash was accompanied by two bleeps, others would almost never see the second flash,” said researcher Benjamin de Haas, a neuroscientist at University College London.

These differences suggested to de Haas and his colleagues that maybe variations in brain anatomy were behind who saw the illusion and who did not. To find out, the researchers analyzed the brains of 29 volunteers with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and tested them with flashes and bleeps. [Animation of Illusion and Photos of Other Illusions]

Click for Video.http://www.livescience.com/24223-how-sound-changes-sight-how-many-flashes-do-you-see-video.html

On average, the volunteers saw the illusion 62 percent of the time, although some saw it only 2 percent of the time while others saw it 100 percent of the time. They found the smaller a person’s visual cortex was — the part of the brain linked with vision —the more likely he or she experienced the illusion.

 

“If we both look at the same thing, we would expect our perception to be identical,” de Haas told LiveScience. “Our results demonstrate that this not quite true in every situation — sometimes what you perceive depends on your individual brain anatomy.”

The researchers suggest this illusion could reveal a way the brain compensates for imperfect visual circuitry.

“The visual brain’s representation of what hits the eye is very efficient but not perfect — there is some uncertainty to visual representations, especially when things happen quickly, like the rapid succession of flashes in the illusion,” de Haas said. “We speculate that this kind of uncertainty is bigger in brains that dedicate a smaller proportion of neurons to visual areas, just like a camera with fewer megapixels will give you a lower image quality.”

“If this speculation holds, it would make perfect sense for smaller visual brains to make more use of the additional information provided by the ears,” de Haas explained. “In the real world, sources of light and sound are often identical, and combining them will be advantageous. Imagine you take a twilight walk in a forest and scare up some animal in the undergrowth. The best strategy for finding out whether you are dealing with a hedgehog or a bear will involve combining visual information, like moving twigs and branches, with auditory information, like cracking wood.”

Much remains unknown about the roots of this illusion. For instance, only about a quarter of the individual differences regarding the illusion could be explained by brain anatomy. “We still haven’t explained the rest,” de Haas said.

Future research can also explore “whether the relationship between visual cortex size and audiovisual perception is specific to this illusion or holds for other audiovisual illusions as well,” de Haas said.

http://www.livescience.com/24191-why-some-people-see-sound.html

 

 

Scientists Measure Pain.-New Technic.

Every thing seems to be quantified!

 

Physicians gauging pain have little to go on besides a patient’s self-report. And some sufferers simply can’t communicate how they’re feeling.

So scientists have searched for a reliable way to measure pain physiologically. And they may finally have one.

Researchers performed functional MRI scans on the brains of 24 subjects who were having an arm heated to the point of moderate pain. The subjects’ brain patterns were recorded both as they experienced pain and zero pain. The researchers then used an algorithm to develop a pain model, based on the patterns. The work was published in the journal PLoS One.

The researchers then analyzed the brain scan patterns of 16 new subjects, some experiencing pain, some not. They found that their model accurately predicted pain levels 81 percent of the time.

Most studies of physiology-based measurements of pain have focused on heart rate, skin conductance and EEG. These measures correlate with pain, but nothing has been accurate enough to substitute for self-reports.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/21/measure-pain-mri_n_974213.html

Psychiatric Drugs shrink Brain.

Image via Wikipedia

 

Psychiatry at best is randomly proved quackery.

They treat the Brain instead of the Mind.

They are not sure which system of Psychology to follow.

Freud,Jung,Adler et all.

Or William James’s behavior theory!

They end up treating Brain biologically and most of the drugs they prescribe are harmful to health.

Evidence that prescription drugs shrink patients’ brains would, one might think, suggest only one course of action: stop prescribing them. But the matter turns out to be much more complicated, according to research published today inArchives of General Psychiatry on the effects of antipsychotic drugs in people with schizophrenia¹.

In the past 15 years, research has indicated that people with schizophrenia have smaller cerebral volumes than the general population, and that this reduction is particularly large in ‘grey-matter‘ structures, which contain the cell bodies of neurons. For instance, one meta-analysis points to 5–7% reductions in the size of the amygdala, hippocampus and parahippocampus², which are all involved in memory storage and retrieval.

But scientists have debated whether the decrease is caused by the disease alone, or whether powerful antipsychotic drugs also have a role. According to the latest findings, the more antipsychotics patients receive, the more likely they are to have a decreased amount of grey matter.

The research was led by Beng Choon Ho, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. His team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 211 patients, administering on average 3 scans per patient over a 7.2-year period¹. They found that treatment length and the type and dose of antipsychotic drugs taken were both relatively good predictors of total brain volume change. Use of antipsychotics explained 6.6% of the change in total brain volume and 1.7% of the change in total grey-matter volume.

The study developed from a previous work in which Ho’s team analysed the contribution of a genetic variation to grey-matter volume reduction³. In the latest work, the researchers looked again at those results and added data from more patients. This time, they examined the contribution from the dose of antipsychotics prescribed. They found that the greatest reduction came in those who had been recently diagnosed — and so would have just started taking the medications. “We did not expect to see this,” says Ho.

Ho says that the effect is “small but significant”. He adds, “We have been looking at the data for five years. We’ve been very careful to get it right because of the potential implications.”

Missing control

The scale of the study is impressive, says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Heidelberg in Mannheim, Germany. “It’s by far the largest sample studied longitudinally. And there was a great follow-up and retention rate,” he says. Stefan Borgwardt, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Basel, Switzerland, says that the study “will definitely have a great impact, not only on the field of schizophrenia research but also on clinical practice”.

Animal studies support the link. David Lewis, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, found that healthy non-human primates, given doses of antipsychotics similar to those given to humans, showed brain volume reductions of around 10%, mostly attributable to loss of the glial cells that support and protect neurons^4,5.

But Lewis, who has written an editorial to accompany Ho’s study⁶, warns that his own, Ho’s and other studies are “convergent but still circumstantial”. It is impossible to distinguish the effect of the disease from that of the drug, he says, because “both are changing over time”.

Ho acknowledges that his study is marred by the lack of a placebo control group — for ethical reasons, patients cannot be deprived of the medications they need — and the lack of ‘within individual’ studies in which the same patient either uses or does not uses the drugs. “It’s not the ideal study design, but as good as we could ever get with something like this,” says Ho.

Meyer-Lindenberg warns against over-interpreting MRI data, which can be affected by confounding factors including lifestyle, smoking and socioeconomic differences. “Although it does address them as far as possible statistically, this study cannot exclude them,” he says. Meyer-Lindberg himself published a study last year showing that antipsychotics cause quickly reversible changes in brain volume that do not reflect permanent loss of neurons (see ‘Antipsychotic deflates the brain’)⁷.

http://current.com/news/92972272_wtf-psychiatric-drugs-shrink-patients-brains-please-comment.htm?xid=320

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110207/full/news.2011.75.html

 

 

Neck and Shoulder Pain,causes,treatment

Image via Wikipedia

Neck and Shoulder pain affects people of all ages.

For those who are over 50 years, in addition to other physiological problems, the pain is normally due to aging.

Normally, if you have not had serious injury or chronic pain earller , chances are the pain is due to aging.

In addition to that, it may be due to using too high a pillow for sleeping,keeping the neck in one position for a long period(as in sitting before a computer) , driving for a long time lifting heavy objects and rolling the shoulder over for a longer period of time.

This may be avoided.

Unless other wise diagnosed by the physician, if you can avoid the above practices, the pain will not occur.

For neck pain  you may use a perfectly cylindrical object( hard) for the head for about two hours ,sleep on hard surface and do not use cushions or soft pillows.

Story:

Neck and shoulder pain can be classified in many different ways. Some people experience only neck pain or only shoulder pain, while others experience pain in both areas.

Pain killers may be used sparingly under supervision.(Brufen combination is to be avoided)

What Causes Neck Pain?

Causes of neck pain include:

• Abnormalities in the bone or joints
• Trauma
• Poor posture
• Degenerative diseases
• Tumors
• Muscle strain

What Causes Shoulder Pain?

The shoulder is a ball and socket joint with a large range of movement. Such a mobile joint tends to be more susceptible to injury. Shoulder pain can stem from one or more of the following causes:

• Strains from overexertion
• Tendonitis from overuse
• Shoulder joint instability
• Dislocation
• Collar or upper arm bone fractures
• Frozen shoulder
• Pinched nerves (also called radiculopathy)

How Are Neck and Shoulder Pain Diagnosed?

• X-rays: Plain X-rays can reveal narrowing of the space between two spinal bones, arthritis-like diseases, tumors, slipped discs, narrowing of the spinal canal, fractures and instability of the spinal column.
• MRI:Magnetic resonance imaging is a noninvasive procedure that can reveal the detail of neural (nerve-related) elements.
• Myelography/CT scanning: Sometimes used as an alternative to MRI
• Electrodiagnostic studies:Electromyography (EMG) and nerve conduction velocity (NCV) are sometimes used to diagnosis neck and shoulder pain, arm pain, numbness and tingling.

How Are Neck and Shoulder Pain Treated?

The treatment of soft tissue neck and shoulder pain includes the use of anti-inflammatory medication (such as Aleve or Motrin) and/or acetaminophen (Tylenol). Depending on the source of pain, drugs like muscle relaxers and even antidepressants might be helpful. Pain also may be treated with a local application of moist heat or ice. Local corticosteroid injection is often helpful for arthritis of the shoulder. For both neck and shoulder pain movement exercises may help. For cases in which nerve roots or the spinal cord are involved, surgical procedures may be necessary.

http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/guide/neck-shoulder?ecd=wnl_art_012811

Related:

Top 5 Questions to Ask Your Doctor About Neck Pain

1. Can you recommend any home exercises or physical therapy for my pain?
2. Do I need any additional tests to diagnose my neck pain?
3. What activities should I avoid because of my pain?
4. What is the cause of my neck pain? Is it a pinched nerve?
5. Which medicines do you recommend, and are they available over the counter?

Additional Questions You May Consider Asking About Neck Pain

1. Am I likely to get neck pain again?
2. Can I apply heat or ice to my painful areas?
3. Do you recommend using a neck collar?
4. How long do you think my neck pain will last?
5. If my neck pain gets worse when I start exercise then what should I do?
6. Is my neck pain likely to get worse with time?
7. What can I do to prevent my neck pain from getting worse?

http://www.everydayhealth.com/pain-management/neck-pain/ask-your-doctor-about-neck-pain.aspx