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Acute pain is eased with the touch of a hand
http://www.physorg.com/news204463540.html
September 23, 2010
There may be a very good reason that people naturally clutch their
hand after receiving an injury. A new report published online on
September 23 in Current Biology shows that self-touch offers
significant relief for acute pain under experimental conditions. The
researchers suggest that the relief comes from a change in the brain's
representation of the rest of the body.
"Pain is quite an important, but also complicated, experience and can
be caused in many different ways," said Patrick Haggard of University
College London. "We show that levels of acute pain depend not just on
the signals sent to the brain, but also on how the brain integrates
these signals into a coherent representation of the body as a whole."
Haggard and his colleague Marjolein Kammers, also of University
College London, made the discovery by studying the effects of
self-touch in people who were made to feel pain using an experimental
condition known as the thermal grill illusion (TGI). "The TGI is one
of the best-established laboratory methods for studying pain
perception," Haggard explained. "In our version, the index and ring
fingers are placed in warm water and the middle finger in cold water.
This generates a paradoxical feeling that the middle finger is
painfully hot." That's ideal because it allows scientists to study the
experience of pain without actually causing any injury to those who
participate in the studies.
When TGI was induced in an individual's two hands and then the three
fingers of one hand were touched to the same fingers on the other hand
immediately afterwards, the painful heat experienced by the middle
finger dropped by 64 percent compared to a condition without
self-touch. That relief didn't come when only one hand was placed
under TGI conditions. Partial self-touch in which only one or two
fingers were pressed against each other didn't work either. Nor did it
work to press the affected hand against an experimenter's hand that
had also been warmed and cooled in the same way.
"In sum," the researchers wrote, "TGI was reduced only when
thermosensory and tactile information from all three fingers was fully
integrated. That is, TGI reduction required a highly coherent
somatosensory pattern, including coherence between tactile and thermal
patterns and coherence of stimuli between the two hands."
Haggard said that earlier studies of chronic pain had suggested the
importance of body representation in the experience of pain. For
example, the phantom pain that is often felt following amputation of a
limb appears to lessen with time as the brain converges on an updated
representation of the body. Haggard said the new findings extend the
important role of body representation to acute pain and may lead to a
better understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in chronic pain
as well.
The findings might be put to practical use, the researchers say. "Our
work suggests that therapies aimed at strengthening the multisensory
representation of the body may be effective in reducing pain," Haggard
said.
Provided by Cell Press
"Ethics" is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.
There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history,
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.
On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour.
Rael
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