Health

ATTENTION-SEEKING:

Take This Sugar Pill and Call Me in the Morning (Jeannette Cooperman, May 22, 2025, The Common Reader)

In a study of dental pain, patients were given morphine, and it helped their pain. Not surprising. But others were given saline placebos, and they, too, had less pain. Those who suffered were those given naloxone, which blocks the effect of opioids. So were the placebos triggering the brain’s release of natural opioids?

These and other studies “support the emerging concept that drugs and placebos share a common mechanism of action,” says Dr. Fabrio Benedetti, a neuroscientist and placebo expert at the University of Turin Medical School. That sounds clean and tidy. Yet “a placebo pill has almost no effect when administered by researchers who do not care about the placebo effect,” writes an academic who keeps his blog anonymous, “but the exact same pill has an enormous effect larger than all existing treatments when administered by a researcher who really wants the placebo effect to be real.” His conclusion? That it is the attention paid by the researcher, not the placebo itself, that makes the difference.

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

We’ve Long Known That Music Eases Pain. Now, Science Is Proving It. (Michaela Haas,
May 22, 2025, Reasons to be Cheerful)

A recent meta-analysis by California Northstate University revealed that listening to music lowered patients’ pain levels after surgery and accelerated their recovery. These patients needed less than half the amount of morphine compared to those who didn’t listen to music. Additionally, their heart rates stayed in a healthier range, suggesting a profound physiological effect. “When patients wake up after surgery, sometimes they feel really scared and don’t know where they are,” said Eldo Frezza, senior author of the study and a surgery professor at California Northstate University College of Medicine. “Music can help ease the transition from the waking up stage to a return to normalcy and may help reduce stress around that transition.”

A new University of California, San Francisco, study shows that when people experience high levels of pain, signal activity spikes in the orbitofrontal cortex, an area highly impacted by music. This might explain why music therapy can be effective for pain management. It gives the brain a vibrant new melody to focus on.

IT’LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

How 3D printing is personalizing health care (Anne Schmitz & Daniel Freedman, 5/20/25, The Conversation)

Three-dimensional printing is transforming medical care, letting the health care field shift from mass-produced solutions to customized treatments tailored to each patient’s needs. For instance, researchers are developing 3D-printed prosthetic hands specifically designed for children, made with lightweight materials and adaptable control systems.

These continuing advancements in 3D-printed prosthetics demonstrate their increasing affordability and accessibility. Success stories like this one in personalized prosthetics highlight the benefits of 3D printing, in which a model of an object produced with computer-aided design software is transferred to a 3D printer and constructed layer by layer.

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Scientists Say Shock Collar-Like Device Can Treat PTSD (Noor Al-Sibai, May 10, 2025, Futurism)

The underlying concept behind vagus nerve stimulation, or VNS, is intriguing. Scientists believe that stimulating the nerve can help one’s brain adapt and change on a neurological level. For years now, VNS has been used to treat everything from epilepsy and depression to sleep deprivation and tinnitus. Today, there are even handheld VNS devices on the market that allow people to mildly zap their brains at home.

This new experimental treatment, however, diverges from prior VNS applications because it not only involves hyper-targeted nerve stimulation, but also works in tandem with a traditional talk therapy method known as “prolonged exposure therapy” or PET, in which PTSD survivors confront their traumatic memories in hopes of getting past them.

SELF-INDULGENCE:

Book Review: A Clear-Eyed Look at the Risks of ‘Diagnosis Creep’: In “The Age of Diagnosis,” Suzanne O’Sullivan challenges some common assumptions about how we detect and treat disease (Lola Butcher,, 05.09.2025, UnDark)

O’Sullivan’s book explores another possibility: Are normal differences among individuals being diagnosed as medical conditions? By plopping modern medicine on the exam table, O’Sullivan offers a thought-provoking challenge to our common assumptions about the importance of early and accurate diagnosis. Among them, can test results be trusted as facts? Is early intervention the best way to deal with a medical problem? And fundamentally, is having a diagnosis always better than not?

“The Age of Diagnosis” reads like an update to “Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health,” a 2011 book by internist H. Gilbert Welch and two colleagues that presented compelling evidence that common conditions — hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis, and several types of cancer — are routinely overdiagnosed.

Welch lays the blame on overdetection — screening programs, imaging scans, and genetic tests that detect abnormalities that would never progress to be problems — and O’Sullivan agrees. In her view, some responsibility lies with doctors and scientists who are seduced by technological advances that allow them to spot potential problems.

But she seems more interested in the role of patients — and parents of patients — who demand a diagnosis when life does not proceed the way they want. “An expectation of constant good health, success and a smooth transition through life is met by disappointment when it doesn’t work out that way,” she writes. “Medical explanations have become the sticking plaster we use to help us manage that disappointment.”

Diagnosis is a function of our need to feel special.

SELF-INDULGENCE:

Brain retraining therapy offers new hope for chronic pain sufferers (Abhimanyu Ghoshal, May 06, 2025, New Atlas)

A recent study shows that retraining your brain to deescalate negative emotions and enhance positive ones could be an effective therapy for persistent and long-lasting pain.

The study, conducted by researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Sydney and Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), involved 89 participants across Australia aged 26-77 years-old, who suffered from chronic pain. They took part in a nine-week program to develop mindfulness, emotional regulation skills, and distress tolerance to help weather an emotional crisis.

The researchers learned that chronic pain isn’t just sensory, it’s also connected to patients’ emotional state

SCAT OR SHOT?:

Excerpt: from (Don’t Be Squeamish) The Unlikely Cure for a Gut Disease: The success of fecal transplants to combat hospital-acquired diarrhea shows how crucial gut bacteria are to our bodies. (Gabriel Weston, 05.02.2025, UnDark)

It turns out the gut isn’t a simple tube after all, but the largest sensory organ we have, the most receptive interface that exists between a person and the outside world. With more immune cells than across the rest of the body put together, and an internal surface area a hundred times bigger than the skin, the gut is held within an elaborate harness we now call the gut-brain, which contains up to 600 million neurons. This plexus of nerves doesn’t just chivvy food along. It is like a delicate switchboard, continually integrating information about what we’ve eaten, our blood chemistry, our immune state, and our microbiology.

In 2004, a landmark study by the Japanese gastroenterologist Nobuyuki Sudo showed that mice raised with no gut flora have a disrupted stress response, which can be partly corrected by colonizing their intestines with normal bacteria. Since then, countless experiments have demonstrated that the brain, the gut, and its resident bacteria coexist in an intimate three-way circuit. With the vast majority of all gut research published in the last 20 years, we’re learning more every single day about the importance of these previously disregarded life forms, why it matters to have a diverse gut flora, and the numerous pathological consequences that may occur if this balance gets disrupted. […]

Powerful modern informatics have revealed a hidden universe of hundreds of trillions of viruses, fungi, yeasts, and bacteria which make our bodies their home, 99 percent of which reside in the gut. Research has also showed us what they do. Bacteria extract nutritional goodies, especially in times of food scarcity. They break down fiber into short-chain fatty acids, which regulate sugar metabolism and appetite. They make vitamins by a process of fermentation.

But they operate well beyond the gut’s traditional remit of digestion and absorption. Gut bacteria actually keep us healthy. In the case of C. diff, simply having a gut with a rich array of different species keeps the microbe in balance with its neighbors, and stops it taking over and causing disease.

You’d think these headlines about the importance of gut diversity must be hot off the press. But it isn’t so. As far back as 1886, Austrian pediatrician Theodor Escherich described the rich variety of infant gut bacteria, including their role in the decomposition of food. Just before the turn of the 20th century, Henry Tissier successfully treated a group of children suffering from gastrointestinal disease with a concoction of bacteria taken from healthy breastfeeding babies. During the First World War, microbiologist Alfred Nissle developed and patented gelatine capsules which contained a particular strain of E. coli as a treatment for dysentery in soldiers. […]

The march to beat C. Diff continues apace.  A potential mRNA vaccine against the bug has yielded promising results in mice. 

“WHY DO YOU ROB BANKS?”

Patients Kept Nearly Dying at a Texas Hospital. No One Suspected an Inside Job.: How dangerous doctors keep slipping through the system—and how you can protect yourself. (Brent Crane, Nov 22, 2024, Men’s Health)

A disturbing reality was beginning to take shape: Someone at the North Dallas Surgicare center was tampering with those bags.

CLINICIDE REFERS TO doctors who intentionally cause a patient’s death during treatment. It was coined in 2007 by Robert M. Kaplan, a forensic psychiatrist in Sydney, Australia. Though the term is relatively new, the phenomenon is old. One of the first documented cases was that of William Palmer, who poisoned several patients in mid-19th-century England.

Other grim notables include Harold Shipman, a British general practitioner who is thought to have murdered as many as 450 patients in the late 20th century, and Michael Swango, M.D., an American who killed 60 patients in several U. S. states, Zambia, and Zimbabwe between 1983 and 1996.

Nurses have also been prolific killers. In fact, one 2006 study of serial murder by health-care professionals, published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, found that nurses accounted for 86 percent of the prosecutions of these cases.

The personality types and profiles of perpetrators are myriad, but these people all do harm under the cover of care. The authors of a 2020 paper in the British Medical Journal were blunt: “Arguably, medicine has thrown up more serial killers than all the other professions put together.”

Varied as the psychological motivations behind clinicide may be, “the critical issue is the power doctors hold over life and death,” says Kaplan. Psychopaths, like Shipman and Swango, use the thrill of killing to overcome their inner emotional numbing, and there is also “a gray zone for those with massive hubris who will not accept criticism of their work and see themselves above the issues affecting their patients,” he adds. All of this raises the question: How can we, as patients, trust that our doctor is not one of the bad ones?

In America, there are systems that are supposed to weed out the rotten apples. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed into law the Health Care Quality Improvement Act. This enabled the formation of the National Practitioners Data Bank (NPDB), a federal database of physician disciplinary, malpractice, judgment, and conviction reports. It was intended to prevent dangerous doctors from jumping from state to state and to provide legal protection for those reporting negligent colleagues.

How is it, then, that nearly four decades later, the problem of lethal health-care professionals persists? That they can rampage through reputable facilities like the Baylor Scott & White North Dallas Surgicare center? One reason is that the average health-care professional is simply not on the lookout for malicious colleagues. “Medicine is messy, and you don’t always get the results you hope for or your patient hopes for,” says Kaplan. “So there’s a great degree of tolerance for adverse events. That takes you a long way before somebody starts thinking, Damn, is he deliberately killing these people?”

PATIENT, HEAL THYSELF:

“Honest” placebos: Sugar pills can work even when you know they’re fake (Rich Haridy, February 22, 2025, New Atlas)

A fascinating study published in 2018 found patients suffering from cancer-related fatigue displayed significant improvement in their symptoms after being given an inert placebo. All the subjects were told at the beginning of the trial that the pills they were given contained no active pharmacological ingredients, yet a notable placebo effect was still detected. The research was just one piece of evidence in a compelling body of work suggesting “honest” placebos could play a role in certain kinds of clinical treatments.

It’s all in your head…

HARSHING THE SINOPHOBE MELLOW:

What sparked the COVID pandemic? Mounting evidence points to raccoon dogs (Smriti Mallapaty, 2/21/25, Nature)

One of the reasons raccoon dogs were suggested as a prime candidate early on is because they were probably involved in passing another, related, virus to people. In 2003, researchers isolated close matches of the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in several civets and a raccoon dog at a live-animal market in Guangdong, China.

This finding prompted researchers in Germany to investigate these animals’ susceptibility to SARS-CoV-21.

They found that raccoon dogs can be infected by SARS-CoV-2, and — despite not getting that sick themselves — can pass on the infection to other animals.

Studies by Holmes and his colleagues have also shown that farmed and wild raccoon dogs in China are often infected with many viruses that can jump between species. “Raccoon dogs are very common viral hosts,” says Holmes.

Many of the first cases of COVID-19 involved the Huanan market, suggesting it was the location of the viral spillover. SARS-CoV-2 sequences from the first infected people, in late December 2019 and early January 2020, along with geolocation and epidemiological data, support this2.

During the outbreak, the market was shut down by the authorities, but researchers know that raccoon dogs were being sold there, for their fur and as food. In June 2021, a study described the results of monthly surveys of live wild animals sold across four markets in Wuhan between May 2017 and November 2019, including seven stalls at Huanan3. Every month, an average of 38 raccoon dogs were sold at these markets. The most-sold species was the Amur hedgehog (Erinaceus amurensis) at an average 332 individuals a month. Masked palm civet (Paguma larvata), hog badgers (Arctonyx albogularis), Chinese bamboo rats (Rhizomys sinensis), and Malayan porcupines (Hystrix brachyura) were also regularly sold.

December 2019 sales records from the Huanan market also list trading of live animals or products from bamboo rats, porcupines and hedgehogs, among others.

Further evidence to support the raccoon-dog theory came in 2023. Chinese researchers published genomic data of swabs taken at the Huanan market in January 2020, after it was shut down, including of stalls, rubbish bins and sewage4. Studies found mitochondrial DNA of raccoon dogs in several swabs, including those that also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Raccoon dogs and hoary bamboo rats (Rhizomys pruinosus) were the most common mammalian wildlife species detected in the mitochondrial DNA; material from civets and hog badgers was also found but not in many samples5. The findings don’t prove that the animals were infected with SARS-CoV-2, but had they been infected, this is the type of evidence you would expect to find, says Andersen.

…and Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK.