Placebo Effect Caught In the Act In Spinal Nerves

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday November 04, @08:07AM
from the time-to-shut-down dept.

medicine

SerpensV passes along the news that German scientists have found direct evidence that the spinal cord is involved in the placebo effect (whosediminishing over time we discussed a bit earlier)."The researchers who made the discovery scanned the spinal cords of volunteers while applying painful heat to one arm. Then they rubbed a cream onto the arm and told the volunteers that it contained a painkiller, but in fact it had no active ingredient. Even so, the cream made spinal-cord neural activity linked to pain vanish. 'This type of mechanism has been envisioned for over 40 years for placebo analgesia,' says Donald Price, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the new study. 'This study provides the most direct test of this mechanism to date.'"