Health

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

When pain really is in your head (Nancy Shute, 9/-7/24, Science News)

As we report in this issue, researchers are now getting a better handle on the complexities of chronic pain, including the brain’s role in amplifying or maintaining pain, and people’s perceptions. As freelance science journalist Cassandra Willyard reports, scientists are pursuing possibilities ranging from new medications to a tiny injectable electrode to forms of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help patients grasp that chronic pain is sometimes a misfiring signal from the brain that can be managed. Rather than one-size-fits-all, these treatments will be tailored to the patient, and will likely include multiple treatments to better address the complexities of chronic pain.

CHASING FADS:

The Case for Hypochondria (Anna Altman, August 21, 2024, New Republic)

“Hypochondria has been called ‘the ancient malady,’” writes Caroline Crampton in her lyrical new book, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria. “For as long as humans have had an understanding of health, there has been anxiety about it”—especially when that understanding is subject to superstition and misconception.

What happens with that worry—what behaviors develop, how much it hampers or deforms us, how it relates to our symptoms and our interpretation of them—is where things get tricky. If doctors tell us there is nothing wrong with us, but we persist in our anxiety, are we acting pathologically? Or are we experiencing something as yet unknown, at the edge of medical knowledge? Is hypochondria a somatic condition—a form of mental illness, an experience of the mind expressed in the body—or is it rooted in physical experience? Is it a diffuse anxiety about health, fear of contracting communicable disease, or the conviction that an illness is already present? Is it a form of obsessive compulsion? What is hypochondria’s relationship to diagnosed illness, anyway? Is it always an unhinged departure from what’s happening in the body, or is it sometimes a reasonable response to the uncertainty of corporeal experience?

It was bad enough when hypochondria was just a form of keeping up with the Joneses, but now that so many “conditions” have been valorized it’s also a way of making yourself seem special, without any risk of being judged weak.

A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE:

Placebos reduce anxiety even when people know they’re taking fake pills (Paul McClure, August 26, 2024, New Atlas)

Taking placebo pills fully aware that they contain no active pharmacological ingredients can still significantly reduce stress, anxiety and depression according to a new study. It’s suggested that these ‘non-deceptive placebos’ might be an effective way of improving mental health.

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Hard-to-treat traumas and painful memories may be treatable with EMDR – a trauma therapist explains why it is gaining popularity (Laurel Niep, 8/16/24, The Conversation)

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing was developed in 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro after she discovered that moving her eyes from her left foot to her right as she walked – in other words, tracking her feet with each step – resulted in lower levels of negative emotions connected with difficult memories, both from the more recent frustrations of the day and deeper events from her past.

Conventional treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy, rely on extensive verbal processing to address a client’s symptoms and struggles. Such therapy may take months or even years.

Depending on the trauma, EMDR can take months or years too – but generally, it resolves issues much more quickly and effectively. It is effective for both adults and children, and can be done remotely.

Any distracxtion works.

VAX, MASK, CLOSE:

What worked to stop the spread of COVID-19? (Kevin Drim, 8/07/24, Jabberworking)

A recent paper by Christopher Ruhm of the University of Virginia quantifies the value of various efforts to combat COVID-19 in the US. The headline result is a composite score for different states based on what kinds of restrictions they imposed, but I found the detailed national breakdown more interesting. Here are his estimates of how various interventions affected death rates:

BE PURITAN:

Stricter Covid mask rules could’ve saved hundreds of thousands of lives, new study finds
Restrictions in Northeastern states likely ‘saved many lives’ say researchers (Josh Marcus, 7/28/24, The Independent)

The US could have avoided almost 250,000 Covid-19 deaths if every state had adopted stricter mask and vaccine requirements seen in the Northeast during the height of the pandemic, according to a new study.

Researchers say that the country, which saw more than 1.1 million Covid deaths, could have been spared an estimated 118,000 to 248,000 more lives.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Who’s Afraid of the Placebo Effect?: New research into the healing power of placebos could upend our understanding of medicine, if the medical industry is willing to listen (Josh Sims, July 26, 2024, Inside Hook)

The placebo effect involves the release of feel-good neurotransmitters, plus increased activity in parts of the brain related to mood and emotions. It appears to be the product of our positive expectations and some Pavlovian conditioning.

IT’LL BE LONG BIRD FLU ONCE THAT’S TRENDY:

Looking for Long Covid: A Clash of Definition and Study Design (SARA TALPOS, 07.25.2024, UnDark)

Few experts dispute that long Covid can be debilitating, or that it warrants careful study. But in interviews with Undark, a number of experts said that it is misleading to frame long Covid as an increasing threat. The best data, they say, suggest that most people recover from the disorder and that long Covid rates will decline as people develop immunity. (A July study by the VA St. Louis team also found that rates of long Covid declined over the course of the pandemic.)

The work produced by Al-Aly and his colleagues, which relies on electronic health records of U.S. veterans, is also a key point of contention. In interviews, several experts questioned the VA St. Louis’ methods. At the request of Undark, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch reviewed the group’s first long Covid study and raised a range of concerns. Many of them related to the handling of negative controls, a statistical technique that, when deployed properly, can help researchers detect problems in the analysis of their dataset. Some of the negative controls “are simply misused in the paper,” Lipsitch wrote in an email to Undark.

Additionally, some experts suggested that the VA St. Louis studies are not truly measuring long Covid. “They’re not studying post-viral illness, in my opinion, in these VA studies,” said Anders Hviid, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and head of the Department of Epidemiology Research at the Statens Serum Institut. Post-viral syndromes, said Hviid, are relatively rare and are usually characterized by fatigue and cognitive difficulties. Al-Aly’s research, meanwhile, looks at what Hviid described as a gamut of outcomes: dementia, thromboembolisms, psychiatric diseases, kidney diseases — “everything under the sun,” he said.

At best, the studies are detecting health problems known to occur when people with poor baseline health experience a severe infection of any kind, said Hviid. At worst, the findings simply reflect bias in the study design, and are picking up on symptoms that are not caused by Covid-19 at all. “It’s a disappointment that not more U.S. scientists have spoken up about this,” said Hviid.

Heck, they still pretend fibromyalgia is a thing.

IT IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

The placebo effect unlocked: How the brain tricks itself into pain relief (Bronwyn Thompson, July 25, 2024, New Atlas)

The findings do more than just solve a puzzle for neuroscientists and put to bed any thought that the placebo effect was ‘all in your head’ (even though, quite literally, it is).