Doctors learn to distance themselves from their patient’s pain.
Doctors learn to shut down the part of the brain that empathises with the pain their patients suffer during treatment, so they can avoid becoming distressed by conducting unpleasant medical procedures. Brain scans have revealed that doctors show a different pattern of neural activity to other people when watching videos of painful therapies.
Excellent resource on Hypnosis + pain research, including references to studies of hypnotically-induced pain, which in an fMRI activates similar regions to pain induced physically.
However, when subjects who have not been hypnotized are asked to imagine feeling pain, it’s much less intense than what is experienced under hypnotic suggestion.
China is propping up the junta in Burma. With the Olympics in Beijing coming up, it’s something worth noting
Norway aids religious schools in Pakistan as part of its foreign aid
Norway’s government minister in charge of foreign aid, Erik Solheim, claims the goal of the aid project was to “promote dialogue.”
He doesn’t dismiss either Ask’s or ICG’s concerns, and said the Koran school support project will be evaluated.Solheim, of the Socialist Left (SV) party, said he also hoped the aid to the schools would further religious tolerance. “We figure that the schools that choose to take part in the project are hardly those that are in tight with al-Qaida,” he said. “We want to be a counterbalance to the fundamentalists.”
Norway has a strong humanist contingent, yet it has less of a church/state barrier than the United States. I have my doubts whether this aid makes the recipients more tolerant of the west. It sounds more like a political ‘pork’ served up to the Pakistani immigrant community in Norway.
Report on a study of treating back pain with acupuncture
In trials among 1,100 patients with chronic lower back pain which had lasted for an average of eight years, almost half (47 per cent) of those who received acupuncture showed significant improvement – compared with barely a quarter (27 per cent) of those given conventional treatment. The effects lasted for at least six months, long after the treatment was completed.
The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Regensberg, in the spa town of Bad Abbach in Germany, who randomly allocated patients to receive ten 30-minute sessions of sham acupuncture, real acupuncture or conventional treatment.
Sham acupuncture involved sticking needles in randomly over the lower back, avoiding the meridians and points that dictate where the needles are placed in traditional acupuncture.
The results showed that 44 per cent of volunteers suffering from back pain showed a significant improvement with sham acupuncture.
1. The study suggests that the philosophy of acupuncture, the meridians, etc, is bogus. It’s about sticking needles into the skin.
2. The gate control theory of pain sensations shows that counter-stimulation can reduce pain by tricking the pain gates in the spine. This is the principal used in transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (Tens).
In addition, there is probably a psychological component. Acupuncture, because of its bizarre appearance, may well have an impressive placebo effect. Placebo pain relief is real, and releases opioids in the brain.
This report emphasizes the anterior cingulate’s role in recognition of the emotions of others, and alcohol’s dampening of that ability. But the ACC also is responsible for the unpleasantness of physical and emotional pain. So dampening it’s activity may be a way in which people drown their sorrows in the bottle.
The brain region that showed the greatest blunting of response in the alcoholic patients was the rostral affective division of the anterior cingulate cortex. Some evidence suggests this brain region might be specialized for higher-order cognitive evaluation and decision making related to affective stimuli, the authors noted.
My wife and I were shocked by how little a dollar could buy when we went to Norway this summer, and
it’s getting worse
The dollar fell its lowest-ever level against the euro on Thursday as the european currency traded above $1.40 for the first time since it was introduced in 1999. The U.S. currency also moved closer to parity with the Canadian dollar.
Breaking the $1.40 barrier for the euro has long been seen as a key turning point in solidifying the euro’s position in global currency markets, providing more impetus for it to be the reserve currency of choice — a position long held by the now-weakening dollar, which has been battered by a recent half-percent cut in U.S. interest rates.
Canada may not be a good alternative by next year.
Meanwhile the Canadian dollar moved decisively above 99 U.S. cents, flirting with one-to-one parity with the American dollar for the first time since November 1976. The currency opened North American trading at 99.42 U.S. cents Thursday and soon rose to 99.96 U.S. cents.
In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney rebutted Alan Greenspan’s criticism of the Bush administration’s fiscal record. I’m no economic expert, but Cheney’s view of the Bush administration’s economic successes seems only a bit more realistic than his view of the administration’s sucess in Iraq.
Having a weaker currency does have some short-term benefits in terms of promoting exports, but overall, by debasing the currency, it seems that the Bush administration is making us poorer.
Teaching Tolerance has a cover story on teaching about religion in public schools. On the positive side, empirical research on the effects of the course found that it increased tolerance without affecting religious preference
However, this increase in religious tolerance was not accompanied by a change in students’ personal religious beliefs, a finding of huge interest to researchers. “This is important,” Haynes said. “It means that learning about different religions will not undermine the faith of the family.” Students who began the semester with strong religious convictions ended the semester with the same beliefs.
Room for improvement:
In addition, the book contains a section on nonbelievers; whether teachers delve into atheism (some do, some don’t) seems to be one of the few ways that different classes deviate from the curriculum.
Paul Kurtz talks about the importance of humanists having a positive agenda in this podcast.
It doesn’t speak well of Islam that when Muslim’s think more seriously about their religion, some of them get more violent. One test of this thesis is to see what happens after Muslims make pilgrimages and attend religious schools. Do they become more peaceful or more violent, more compassionate or more angry?
Another way to slice the data is to look at what happens to Muslims during the special days of the year when they focus more on religion. Liberal Boston Globe writer James Carroll notes what happens during the holy month of Ramadan
In the four years of the Iraqi war, a so-called “Ramadan spike” has marked the period as among the most deadly. Last week’s assassination of Sunni leader Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, who had recently welcomed President Bush to Anbar Province, was doubly shocking for coming at the start of Ramadan. What began as a manifestation of devotion becomes, in periods of conflict, a prompt to zealotry that can include savage violence.
During the Algerian civil war in the 1990s Ramadan was the most dangerous period for the enemies of the radical Islamist rebels, with “lax” Muslims, like intellectuals, being especially targeted. In Egypt and Syria, what is known in Israel and the United States as the Yom Kippur War is called the Ramadan War, since it was launched at the start of the holy month. Again this year, Ramadan overlaps with Yom Kippur, which comes this week.
So here is a second point of data that some Muslims become more violent as they think more about their religion. If there are other Muslims who become more compassionate and more willing to take risks for peace when they think about their religion, these people have not gotten any publicity.
So not to pick on Muslims, it should be noted that Easter used to be a time noted for anti-Semitism, when Jews were attacked for their alleged responsibility for killing Christ. On the other hand, there is an emphasis on peace at Christmas, and there even was a Christmas truce during World War I in 1914, though it was not repeated in subsequent years.
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