All In Your Head (Which Is Where It’s Supposed To Be)

Today’s news is all about things above the neck, and mostly in the brain. From beating depression to beating cognitive decline, from mindfulness against pain to dentistry nightmares to avoid:

Transcranial ultrasound stimulation

Transcranial magnetic stimulation is one of those treatments that sounds like it’s out of a 1950s sci-fi novel, and yet, it actually works (it’s very well-evidenced against treatment-resistant depression, amongst other things). However, a weakness of it is that it’s difficult to target precisely, making modulation of most neurological disorders impossible. Using ultrasound instead of a magnetic field allows for much more finesse, with very promising initial results across a range of neurological disorders

Read in full: Transcranial ultrasound stimulation: a new frontier in non-invasive brain therapy

Related: Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!

This may cause more pain and damage, but at least it’s more expensive too…

While socialized healthcare systems sometimes run into the problem of not wanting to spend money where it actually is needed, private healthcare systems have the opposite problem: there’s a profit incentive to upsell to more expensive treatments. Here’s how that’s played out in dentistry:

Read in full: Dentists are pulling healthy and treatable teeth to profit from implants, experts warn

Related: Tooth Remineralization: How To Heal Your Teeth Naturally

Mindfulness vs placebo, for pain

It can be difficult with some “alternative therapies” to test against placebo, for example “and control group B will merely believe that they are being pierced with needles”, etc. However, in this case, mindfulness meditation was tested as an analgesic vs sham meditation (just deep breathing) and also vs placebo analgesic cream, vs distraction (listening to an audiobook). Mindfulness meditation beat all of the other things:

Read in full: Mindfulness meditation outperforms placebo in reducing pain

Related: No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

Getting personal with AI doctors

One of the common reasons that people reject AI doctors is the “lack of a human touch”. However, human and AI doctors may be meeting in the middle nowadays, as humans are pressed to see more patients in less time, and AI is trained to be more personal—not just a friendlier affect, but also, such things as remembering the patient’s previous encounters (again, something with which overworked human doctors sometimes struggle). This makes a big difference to patient satisfaction:

Read in full: Personalization key to patient satisfaction with AI doctors

Related: AI: The Doctor That Never Tires?

Combination brain therapy against cognitive decline

This study found that out of various combinations trialled, the best intervention against cognitive decline was a combination of 1) cognitive remediation (therapeutic interventions designed to improve cognitive functioning, like puzzles and logic problems), and 2) transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a form of non-invasive direct brain stimulation, similar to the magnetic or ultrasound methods we mentioned earlier today. Here’s how it worked:

Read in full: Study reveals effective combination therapy to slow cognitive decline in older adults

Related: How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

Take care!