Nonsense in the media – acupuncture, pain and the brain

10 February 2010 Acupuncture

I hope that title got your attention. The Telegraph (UK) has just published a story on a brain imaging study of acupuncture for pain relief.  The article is titled:
Acupuncture ‘lessens pain in brain not body’

Scientists discover acupuncture works by making the brain, rather than the body, no longer experience pain, according to [...]

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Getting your thesis out there

8 February 2010 Thesis

We are trying to assist new Doctors of Philosophy to get their findings ‘out there’ by including them here.  We will put up a really quick summary, written by the New Doctor and, wherever possible, a link to where the thesis can be downloaded.  We think this is a good way of both supporting new [...]

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A Great Yarn

6 February 2010 Books

For those of you who have read the Painful Yarns stories – we got an email recently from Tim Beames who sent us a conversation he’d had with one of his patients:
“This big guy with CLBP is standing in front of me with tears rolling down his cheeks whilst I’m blathering on about attention [...]

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Where is my back?

4 February 2010 Abstracts

Chronic pain is associated with a loss of the normal capacity to know where your body is. Chronic pain is also associated with odd bodily feelings. To find out if people with chronic back pain had trouble ‘feeling’ their back, they were asked to draw on a piece of paper the outline of where they felt [...]

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Back pain- Neil OConnell on local muscles going global

1 February 2010 Guest article

We’ve known for a while that people with chronic back pain move differently. Normally when you are going to wave your arm or leg the deep spinal muscles kick in just beforehand, perhaps to provide stability.  In back pain the activity of some of the deep back muscles is delayed in response to spine and [...]

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Body in Mind venturing into some on-line experiments…

29 January 2010 General

We have been working for a while towards doing some experiments that involve online data collection.  These experiments will involve reaction time tasks and questionnaires.  However, many of you will know that Lorimer has NO IDEA when it comes to setting up things like this. However, he is a courageous fellow and has timidly gone [...]

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Medical Weblog Awards Finalists – the polls are open

28 January 2010 General

The polls are now open in the Sixth Annual Medical Weblog Awards. Thanks to everyone who voted it – we didn’t make it into the finalists but there are some excellent weblogs who did, so don’t forget to vote here
From Medgadget
…we would like to thank everyone for taking the time to nominate their favorite medical blogs. [...]

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The paracetamol passion (aka the ‘acetaminophen affair’)

27 January 2010 General

Paracetamol, or as you Americans call it acetaminophen, is, it seems, back in the headlines, amid concerns about new guidelines.I have a couple of thoughts on this that are vaguely connected to the story in Nature Medicine, which you can read here.  First, we tend to forget how good a drug paracetamol is – Lewis [...]

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Piano stairs make exercise fun

25 January 2010 Fun

Dr Iain Beith, a lovely fellow with a penchant for the good things (I mean the really good things, not the reasonably good things like fine wines and live theatre), sent us this and it is absolutely magnifico!  There is little one can add by describing it so you should just watch it.  Suffice to [...]

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Luke Parkitny on neurons that mirror

23 January 2010 Guest article

It is well recognised that the sensory and motor neurons in your brain light up excitedly when you feel or do something. Now we also realise that many of those neurons are actually more interested in what people are doing around you.
These ‘mirror neurons’, according to VS Ramachandran, may have even played a key role [...]

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I got the word daft published in the British Medical Journal

21 January 2010 Abstracts

Often, when you publish something in a reasonably posh journal, your mates right you a little email to say congratulations. However, if you write a word like ‘daft’ in an article that is published in a posh journal like BMJ, it is not just your mates who say congratulations! I got about 40 emails from people I have never heard of over this one. What, exactly, drew such a word out of me? Well…

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