"How you think about pain can have a major impact on how it feels.
That's the intriguing conclusion neuroscientists are reaching as scanning technologies let them see how the brain processes pain.
Alternative remedies for relief of chronic pain are getting new attention and respect these days. Melinda Beck has details on Lunch Break.
That's also the principle behind many mind-body approaches to chronic pain that are proving surprisingly effective in clinical trials.
Some are as old as meditation, hypnosis and tai chi, while others are far more high tech. In studies at Stanford University's Neuroscience and Pain Lab, subjects can watch their own brains react to pain in real-time and learn to control their response-much like building up a muscle. When subjects focused on something distracting instead of the pain, they had more activity in the higher-thinking parts of their brains. When they "re-evaluated" their pain emotionally-"Yes, my back hurts, but I won't let that stop me"-they had more activity in the deep brain structures that process emotion. Either way, they were able to ease their own pain significantly, according to a study in the journal Anesthesiology last month.
While some of these therapies have been used successfully for years, "we are only now starting to understand the brain basis of how they work, and how they work differently from each other," says Sean Mackey, chief of the division of pain management at Stanford.
He and his colleagues were just awarded a 9 million grant to study mind-based therapies for chronic low back pain from the government's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
Some 116 million American adults-one-third of the population- (read the rest of the article at its source, and a nice video they have there as well, atThe Wall Street Journal online) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204323904577038041207168300.html
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