Technology

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