Technology

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

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. 

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?”