Interesting story on pain -- and our beliefs

[Guest guest]

WASHINGTON - Just thinking a medicine will make you feel better actually

may -- even if it's fake, according to new research examining the placebo

effect.

 

One region of the brain is activated by the expectation of pain relief,

researchers said. This, in turn, leads to a reduction of activity in the

portion of the brain that senses pain.

 

In a second study, researchers showed that some of the brain regions

involved in feeling physical pain become activated when someone empathizes

with another's pain.

 

''Very likely the same part of the brain which is affected by empathy for

pain, and therefore suffering, is the area that also our mind or our

expectation has to deal with if we're going to get control of that pain,''

said Dr. Jon Levine, a pain specialist at the University of California, San

Francisco, who reviewed the research.

 

Both studies were published in today's edition of the journal Science.

 

PLACEBO STUDY

 

In the placebo study, volunteers put inside MRI machines had either

electric shocks or heat applied to the arm. The pain activated all the

expected neural pathways, researchers from the University of Michigan and

Princeton University reported.

 

Then, researchers smeared on a cream they said would block the pain. In

fact, it was a regular skin lotion.

 

When the volunteers were zapped again, they reported significantly less

pain -- and pain circuits in the brain showed they really felt better.

Those were the same brain regions that respond to painkilling medication.

 

Then researchers spread on cream again, this time telling the volunteers it

was a placebo -- and they hurt all over again.

 

Doctors long have known the placebo effect is real. It is one reason that

they talk up the benefits of a drug as they write the prescription. But

previously, the effect had been assumed to be psychological, Levine said.

 

Dr. Kenneth Casey, one of the researchers for the placebo study, said the

results should send a message to physicians.

 

''If you're providing a treatment to a patient, it's important that you

realistically provide them with the expectation that it would work, so you

enhance the effect,'' said Casey, a professor at the University of

Michigan. ``If you gave them a drug or any kind of treatment with the

attitude, either explicit or implicit, that this might not be effective, it

would be much less likely to be effective.''

 

EMPATHY RESEARCH

 

In the empathy study, British researchers recruited 16 couples. One at a

time, the women were put into MRI machines; the men sat nearby. The women

could see only their loved one's hand and a computer screen. The women and

men got brief electric shocks to the hand. The computer screen flashed who

would get the next shock and whether it would be mild or very sharp.

 

When the women got shocked, the MRI showed how their brain's entire pain

network activated, researchers reported. They registered feeling the jolt

and how much it stung, from sensory brain regions, as well as how much it

made them suffer -- the ''affective'' or emotional regions.

 

EMOTIONAL REACTION

 

But when the men got shocked, part of the women's pain network sprang into

action, too -- not sensory regions but emotional ones. They knew when the

men were being shocked only by watching the computer screen.

 

The lead researcher, Dr. Tania Singer of University College of London,

likened it to a vivid feeling when imminent pain is imagined and the heart

speeds up before the actual sensation arrives.

 

Men were not studied for their reaction to how women responded to a shock.

 

Singer did not tell the couples that she was studying empathy so as not to

rig the results. But she later asked the women to describe how they felt

when their partner was zapped.

 

''They indicated it was as unpleasant'' when the man got zapped as when

they did, Singer said. ``What they say matched what I saw in the brain

activity.''

 

She also rated their degree of empathy, using questions such as how easily

they cry at movies. The more empathetic their nature, the more emotional

brain activity there was.

 

It was not ''emotional contagion,'' like how one person's yawn can set a

whole room to yawning, because the women could see only their partner's

hand, Singer said.

 

Instead, the women were using the same brain areas that anticipate one's

own pain.

 

STRANGER SUFFERING

 

Singer now is studying whether people can sense a stranger's suffering as

much as a loved one's.

 

Is empathy a learned trait or a genetic one?

 

Her study suggests it is a completely automatic response that varies merely

in its degree, meaning it probably is hard-wired into our brains through

evolution.http://member.newsguy.com/~herblady