MRI Shows Mind Over Matter May Really Diminish Pain

MRI Shows Mind Over Matter May Really Diminish Pain

From the April 8 Medical News Today item

Focus, zen, meditate and your pain may go away or diminish. A new MRI brain image study shows that just after a short period of meditation, pain intensity is weakened when subjected to unpleasent stimuli such as extreme heat.

The study participants were taught a meditation technique known as focused attention, which involves paying close attention to breathing patterns while acknowledging and letting go of thoughts that distract you.

Fadel Zeidan, PhD, who is a postdoctoral fellow at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, says:

“This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation.”…

….Source: Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center News Release

 

Doctors lax in monitoring potentially addicting drugs

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Doctors lax in monitoring potentially addicting drugs
Study: Missed opportunity to reduce opioid-related abuse, addiction and overdose

From a March 3 2011 Eureka news alert

March 3, 2011 — (BRONX, NY) — Few primary care physicians pay adequate attention to patients taking prescription opioid drugs — despite the potential for abuse, addiction and overdose, according to a new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

The study, published in the March 2 online edition of the Journal of General Internal Medicine,*** found lax monitoring even of patients at high risk for opioid misuse, such as those with a history of drug abuse or dependence. The findings are especially concerning considering that prescription drug abuse now ranks second (after marijuana) among illicitly used drugs, with approximately 2.2 million Americans using pain relievers nonmedically for the first time in 2009, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

“Our study highlights a missed opportunity for identifying and reducing misuse of prescribed opioids in primary care settings,” said lead author Joanna Starrels, M.D., M.S. , assistant professor ofmedicine at Einstein. “The finding that physicians did not increase precautions for patients at highest risk for opioid misuse should be a call for a standardized approach to monitoring.”…

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Researchers working toward automating sedation in intensive care units

Researchers working toward automating sedation in intensive care units

Georgia Institute of Technology Research News) Researchers are one step closer to their goal of automating the management of sedation in hospital intensive care units. They have developed control algorithms that use clinical data to accurately determine a patient’s level of sedation and can notify medical staff if there is a change in the level.

 

 

From the February 15, 2011 Eureka news alert

Computer system for evaluating sedation level shows strong agreement with clinical assessment

		IMAGE: Georgia Tech researchers Wassim Haddad, Allen Tannenbaum and Behnood Gholami (left-right) and Northeast Georgia Medical Center chief medical informatics officer James Bailey have developed control algorithms to automate sedation in… Click here for more information.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Northeast Georgia Medical Center are one step closer to their goal of automating the management of sedation in hospital intensive care units (ICUs). They have developed control algorithms that use clinical data to accurately determine a patient’s level of sedation and can notify medical staff if there is a change in the level.

“ICU nurses have one of the most task-laden jobs in medicine and typically take care of multiple patients at the same time, so if we can use control system technology to automate the task of sedation, patient safety will be enhanced and drug delivery will improve in the ICU,” said James Bailey, the chief medical informatics officer at the Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville, Ga. Bailey is also a certified anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist.

During a presentation at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, the researchers reported on their analysis of more than 15,000 clinical measurements from 366 ICU patients they classified as “agitated” or “not agitated.” Agitation is a measure of the level of patient sedation. The algorithm returned the same results as the assessment by hospital staff 92 percent of the time.

“Manual sedation control can be tedious, imprecise, time-consuming and sometimes of poor quality, depending on the skills and judgment of the ICU nurse,” said Wassim Haddad, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Aerospace Engineering. “Ultimately, we envision an automated system in which the ICU nurse evaluates the ICU patient, enters the patient’s sedation level into a controller, which then adjusts the sedative dosing regimen to maintain sedation at the desired level by continuously collecting and analyzing quantitative clinical data on the patient.”…

		IMAGE: Georgia Tech researchers Allen Tannenbaum, Wassim Haddad and Behnood Gholami (left-right) and Northeast Georgia Medical Center chief medical informatics officer James Bailey have developed control algorithms to automate sedation in… Click here for more information.

 

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This project is supported in part by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command (Grant No. 08108002). The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigator (Wassim Haddad) and does not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. Army….

 

 

 

 

Nursing homes are seeking to end the stupor

[Editor Flahiff’s note: I remember visiting my great aunt in a nursing home in the early 70’s (I was in my late teens) I found the stupor among the residents very sad…this story was very refreshing to read…

My husband can attest to the importance of personal attention…he is retired and goes to senior centers daily for lunch and the “pool halls”. He makes it a point to visit with those sitting alone at lunch…and has brought a number of folks out their shells during the past few years]

Instead of treating behavioral problems with antipsychotic drugs, the Ecumen chain of 15 homes is using strategies including aromatherapy, massage, music, games, exercise and good talk. The state is helping out.

From the December 4th Star Tribune article by Warren Wolfe (via a NetGold Posting by David P Dillard )

The aged woman had stopped biting aides and hitting other residents. That was the good news.

But in the North Shore nursing home‘s efforts to achieve peace, she and many other residents were drugged into a stupor — sleepy, lethargic, with little interest in food, activities and other people.

“You see that in just about any nursing home,” said Eva Lanigan, a nurse and resident care coordinator at Sunrise Home in Two Harbors, Minn. “But what kind of quality of life is that?”

Working with a psychiatrist and a pharmacist, Lanigan started a project last year to find other ways to ease the yelling, moaning, crying, spitting, biting and other disruptive behavior that sometimes accompany dementia.

They wanted to replace drugs with aromatherapy, massage, games, exercise, personal attention, better pain control and other techniques. The entire staff was trained and encouraged to interact with residents with dementia.

Within six months, they eliminated antipsychotic drugs and cut the use of antidepressants by half. The result, Lanigan said: “The chaos level is down, but the noise is up — the noise of people laughing, talking, much more engaged with life. It’s amazing.”…

….Medicare spends more than $5 billion a year on those [antipsychotic] drugs for its beneficiaries, including about 30 percent of nursing home residents. Several studies have concluded that more than half are prescribed inappropriately. The drugs are especially hazardous to older people, raising the risk of strokes, pneumonia, confusion, falls, diabetes and hospitalization….

….

Instead of looking for causes of disruptive behavior among dementia patients, doctors typically prescribe drugs to mask the symptoms, he said, because “It’s the easy thing to do. … That’s true in hospitals, in clinics and in nursing homes.”

Federal regulators are cracking down on homes that don’t routinely reassess residents on psychotropic drugs. But use remains widespread….

…