Category: Neuroscience/Mental Health
Nightmares, Night Terrors and Potential Implications for Pediatric Mental Health…..
Earlier this month, the typical media outlets were abuzz (“Childhood nightmares may point to looming health issues“) with the results of a newly published study linking early childhood nightmares and night terrors with future psychotic experiences. Expressing little in the way of skepticism, most reports simply regurgitated the University of Warwick press release. The research, published in the quite legitimate journal Sleep,...
Depression Re-examined: A New Way to Look at an Old Puzzle
Depression affects approximately 10% of Americans. It can be fatal; I found estimates of suicide rates ranging from 2-15% of patients with major depression. When it doesn’t kill, it impairs functioning and can make life almost unbearably miserable. It is a frustrating condition because there is no lab test to diagnose it, no good explanation of its cause, and the treatments are...
Hacking the Brain – A New Paradigm in Medicine
The word “paradigm” is over misused and overused, diluting its utility. Thomas Kuhn coined the term in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to refer to an overarching explanatory system in science. Scientists, according to Kuhn, work within a paradigm during periods of “normal science,” punctuated by occasional “paradigm shifts” when the old explanatory model no longer sufficed, and a radically new explanatory...
Treating Pain Psychologically
One of the goals of rigorous science is to disentangle various causes so we can establish exactly where the lines of cause and effect are. In medicine this allows us to then optimize the real causes (what aspect of treatments actually work) and eliminate anything unnecessary. Eliminating the unnecessary is more than just about efficiency – every intervention in medicine has a...
The Limits of Neuroplasticity
I am daily annoyed by overhyped headlines reporting medical and other science news. I think news outlets and the public would be better served if they fired all their headline writers and let the authors and editors craft headlines that actually reflect the story. Of course, often the story is overhyped as well, so this would not be a panacea to annoying...
Vitamin E for Alzheimer’s
Recently you may have seen headlines like “Vitamin E slows decline in patients with mild Alzheimer’s” or “There’s still no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but the latest hope for slowing its progression is already on drugstore shelves.” They were referring to an article in the January 1, 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) announcing the results of...
Detecting Consciousness in the Vegetative
People in a vegetative state, usually as a result of brain trauma or anoxia (lack of oxygen) by definition have no signs of conscious awareness or activity. The definition, therefore, is based largely on the absence of evidence for consciousness. Of course, arguments based upon the absence of evidence are only as compelling as the degree to which evidence has been properly...
Lorenzo’s Oil: Hollywood versus science
Lorenzo Odone, son of Italian economist Augusto Odone, was diagnosed at age 5 with a horrific genetic disease, X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (X-ALD), which is usually a death sentence by age 10 or so. As portrayed in the movie Lorenzo's Oil, the story of the Odones is a typical Hollywood cliche of a plucky family badgering scientists, finding a "brave maverick scientist" to synthesize...
The End for CCSVI
A new study published in The Lancet provides the most definitive evidence to date that chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI), a hypothetical syndrome of narrowed veins draining the brain that some believe is the true cause of multiple sclerosis (MS), is not associated with MS. In a science-based world, this study would be yet one more nail in the coffin of this...
Quantum Neurology
As the resident neurologist on SBM, my ears always prick up when I come across a new neurology-based scam, and my colleagues often send such items my way. In addition the word “quantum” has become a standard marketing term of alt. med quackery. So how could I resist taking a bite out of “quantum neurology”? One might think (if one were a...