Health

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.

WE ALL WANT TO BE SPECIAL:

Excessive Worry About Health Could be Signs of Illness Anxiety Disorder (Sean Mowbray, Jan 20, 2025, Discover)

Those with illness anxiety disorder will often have trouble finding reassurance in a reasonable way, which can drive “repetitive behaviors or escalating strategies to try to relieve that,” says David Smithson, outreach manager with Anxiety UK.

This can lead to frequent visits to the doctor and recurrent medical testing to gain that reassurance. It can also lead to behaviors that can be harmful to health, such as social isolation, substance misuse, and can lead to other mental health issues such as depression.

“People become preoccupied with that, in some cases, and worry about the slightest suggestion or hint of one of those symptoms being present in their body,” says Smithson. “If you suspect you’ve got a serious life-threatening illness, it can become very debilitating and can be extremely concerning to you as an individual.”

See under Long Covid

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

REVIEW: of I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin (Reviewed by Karl Straub, December 18, 2024, Washington Independent Review of Books)

The big story throughout the book is that different elements of music are processed by different circuits in our brains, and the separate pieces of information are collated and then transferred to new circuits in order to process more complex aspects of the music. Details about pitch, duration, and loudness are stored early on, and the cooperating chain of brain departments eventually turns to complicated issues like the shape of a melody, the sonic character of instruments, and the emotional connections for the listener.

Few human activities compare to listening to music — although hikes in the wild and dancing are distant siblings — with its epic journey of interoffice memos linking both a network of small circuits and the often-isolated two hemispheres of the brain. It’s this sweeping process that leads to medicinal and therapeutic benefits; listening to music can open up alternate neural pathways to substitute for burned-out or dormant ones, and it can also rejuvenate paths exhausted by stress.

Among the book’s other fascinating takeaways: Playing music or singing decreases levels of the stress hormone cortisol, leaving us more relaxed. Children get attached to inanely catchy songs like “Baby Shark” because the repetition of musical information is building the brain pathways they’ll need to enjoy the greater benefits of music later on. Because adults already built their own pathways in childhood, these songs often drive them crazy. (Take heart, Mom and Dad: They really are good for the kids.)

For most music-therapy applications (stress/pain relief, mood alteration, and treating complex neurological dysfunction), the best results happen when the listener picks music they already love. (This means Zell Miller was onto something with his Charlie Daniels theory.) But it’s also true that increased understanding of how music works helps lead to improvements in brain health, even for non-virtuosos. In other words, musical comfort food and the musical equivalent of high fiber are both good for you.

COVID RESTRICTIONS WERE TOO LAX:

Estimating the population-level effects of nonpharmaceutical interventions when transmission rates of COVID-19 vary by orders of magnitude from one contact to another (Richard P. Sear, 12/03/24, Phys. Rev. E )

Statistical physicists have long studied systems where the variable of interest spans many orders of magnitude, the classic example is the relaxation times of glassy materials, which are often found to follow power laws. A power-law dependence has been found for the probability of transmission of COVID-19, as a function of length of time a susceptible person is in contact with an infected person. This is in data from the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 app. The amount of virus in infected people spans many orders of magnitude. Inspired by this, I assume that the power-law behavior found in COVID-19 transmission is due to the effective transmission rate varying over orders of magnitude from one contact to another. I then use a model from statistical physics to estimate that if a population all wear FFP2/N95 masks, this reduces the effective reproduction number for COVID-19 transmission by a factor of approximately nine.

WHAT HAVE VACCINES EVER DONE FOR US?:

Cervical cancer deaths are plummeting among young U.S. women: The findings could be a preview of what’s to come if HPV vaccination rates improve (Andrea Tamayo, November 27, 2024, Science News)

“We had a hypothesis that since it’s been almost 16 years, that maybe we might be starting to see [the] initial impact of HPV vaccination on cervical cancer deaths,” says Ashish Deshmukh, an epidemiologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “And that’s exactly what we observed.”

Just another reason for the incel Right to hate vaccines.

NOT JUST SHOWER CURTAIN RINGS?:

New 3D Bioprinter Could Build Replicas of Human Organs, Offering a Boost for Drug Discovery (Margherita Bassi, November 19, 2024, Smithsonian)

Currently, scientists have only limited ways to create tissue for testing pharmaceutical therapies, such as using lab-grown samples or by relying on traditional 3D bioprinting, per Popular Science’s Andrew Paul. However, cultivating organs in a lab is complex and expensive—and printing them is currently slow and prone to errors, such as positioning cells incorrectly.

“Incorrect cell positioning is a big reason most 3D bioprinters fail to produce structures that accurately represent human tissue,” David Collins, head of the Collins BioMicrosystems Laboratory at the University of Melbourne and a co-author of the study, says in a statement.

“But with our new approach,” Collins and two other researchers write in an article for Pursuit, “not only can we position cells with precision, we can also fabricate at a scale of single cells.”