Making Sense of Sense

by admin on July 30, 2010 · 2 comments

in NeuRA,Neuroscience,Research Teams

The roads less travelled – four paths to get from touch to the body I am studying medicine and as part of our course we do an Independent Learning project. I am doing mine in the Body in Mind research group here at NeuRA.  My first task is to review a key paper in the [...]

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When showing it doesn’t work doesn’t work

28 July 2010 Clinical

I went to Melbourne on the weekend.  To break the time-honoured Moseley tradition of not working on weekends requires some convincing and I was convinced by the nature of the crowd – truly interdisciplinary – and the proximity of venue – a mere 1000 km away.  I went to two talks, so I could get [...]

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The morality of magic kisses: Ethics and placebo in physiotherapy

26 July 2010 BiM Team

When my daughter hurts herself, her placebo of choice is a “magic kiss”. This therapeutic intervention must be applied with care specific to the area of injury. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is very effective. I use placebo freely at home but is it right to do this in the clinic? In a recent post [...]

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What did you expect?

22 July 2010 Back pain

Hands-up who thinks a patient’s expectations influence how well they do in treatment? Nearly everyone? That’s no surprise. Research recently published by a group in the US reported on the relationship between expectation and outcome in a sample of back pain patients receiving physiotherapy.

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We Believe Because We Evolved That Way part two

20 July 2010 Guest article

Why we have a placebo effect – Part II By Peter Blanch continued…. Bruce Hood (Hood 2009) in his book “Supersense: why we believe in the unbelievable” makes a couple of quite pertinent points. He outlines a simple experiment he uses in his presentations where he presents to the audience ‘the pen’ (he admits to stretching [...]

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We Believe Because We Evolved That Way part one

19 July 2010 Guest article

Why we have a placebo effect – Part I By Peter Blanch For a long time now, I have stood with my feet precariously placed on two icebergs that sometimes slowly drift apart and sometimes drift back together again (obviously increasing and decreasing my sensation of precariousness).  The first iceberg is where I started as [...]

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Paul the Psychic Octopus: A watery lesson in understanding clinical evidence

15 July 2010 BiM Team

So the World Cup justifiably goes to Spain and it seems that Paul, the now world famous psychic octopus, predicted the results.  In fact Paul demonstrated a seemingly legendary clairvoyant ability.  Wikipedia informs us that he predicted the outcome of all of Germany’s games and the final with unerring accuracy. You may not have realised [...]

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Lorimer coming to the USA August & September

14 July 2010 Courses

Lorimer is coming to the US to teach some Explain Pain courses in August and September – teaching in Las Vegas, Nevada, Des Moine, Minneapolis, Boston and New York City.

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Preventing CRPS after wrist fracture

13 July 2010 CRPS

The last post described a new paper in BMC Neurology suggesting guidelines for the treatment of CRPS. They also discussed prevention. They concluded that people who fracture their wrist should be given 500 mg daily vitamin C because two RCT’s show a reduction in incidence of CRPS in those who do this[1,2] both papers from [...]

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Breaking news – new guidelines for treating CRPS

12 July 2010 CRPS

BMC Neurology has just published the findings of a group of Dutch researchers in their quest to develop multidisciplinary guidelines for treatment of CRPS[1].  They looked at literature from 1980 – 2005.  It is a major piece of work and I reckon it deserves publication. It is also a shocker when one produces such a [...]

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The Riddle Winner

10 July 2010 Clinical science

Some time ago (Heidi says ‘in the dim distance past’) we ran a riddle about this photo: There were two prizes – for the correct explanation and for the answer we like the best.  Well, surprise surprise, NO ONE got it correct. There were bits that were close. You will see how difficult it is [...]

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