Health

HIP TO BE DISORDERED:

Children shouldn’t fear their feelings (Josephine Bartosch, 26 June, 2025, The Critic)

Report author and counsellor Lucy Beney says that rather than toughening kids up to deal with the challenges of life, today’s schools may be talking them into fragility.

Every school is now required to appoint a “Senior Mental Health Lead”, and there’s cross-party enthusiasm for parachuting therapists into educational institutions. By 2023, over a third of schools had signed up with Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs), and though the Department for Education doesn’t routinely collect data, a 2017 survey suggested that around 85 per cent of secondary schools and 55 per cent of primary schools were already offering counselling services.

This shift is amplified outside the classroom, as social media picks up where school counsellors leave off. On TikTok mental health labels like anxiety and depression, or conditions like ASD, ADHD are used as social capital — with young people trading symptoms like status symbols.

WHEN YOU IGNORE EXTERNALITIES:

ADHD linked to elevated levels of these common heavy metals (Bronwyn Thompson, June 23, 2025, New Atlas)

Exposure to common heavy metals has been linked to the prevalence of ADHD, according to a new study. It builds on existing research that has found that there’s a strong association between certain metals like lead and copper and increased cases of both ADHD and how serious the condition’s symptoms are.

HEAD GAMES:

Drug-free pain relief game progresses to the next level in clinical trial (Bronwyn Thompson, June 05, 2025, Nautilus)

They found that four weeks of gameplay with the animated program and accompanying brain-monitoring headset, showed that 75% of participants had a significant reduction in pain – and it matched a level that was either on par with opioids or even better.

IT’LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE…:

Bioprinted organs ‘10–15 years away,’ says startup regenerating dog skin (Thomas Macauly, May 29, 2025, The Next Web)

Human organs could be bioprinted for transplants within 10 years, according to Lithuanian startup Vital3D. But before reaching human hearts and kidneys, the company is starting with something simpler: regenerating dog skin.

Based in Vilnius, Vital3D is already bioprinting functional tissue constructs. Using a proprietary laser system, the startup deposits living cells and biomaterials in precise 3D patterns. The structures mimic natural biological systems — and could one day form entire organs tailored to a patient’s unique anatomy.

It’s impossible to overstate deflationary pressures.

WHO’D HAVE DREAMT:

Study: Intervention for long COVID sees majority return to work (Dr. Tim Sandle, May 28, 2025, Digital Journal)

A new study shows that doing progressively challenging computerized brain exercises (with coaching) drove significant gains across multiple symptoms of people with long COVID-19, producing ‘large’ to ‘very large’ improvements in the primary measure of functional performance at daily tasks.

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.