Technology

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

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.