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Placebo Effect Caught In the Act In Spinal Nerves
SerpensV passes along the news that German scientists have found direct evidence that the spinal cord is involved in the placebo effect (whose diminishing 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.'"
That sounds like a fun job - you get to burn people, lie right to their face and then publish the results as a scientific breakthrough.
Bend over... this won't hurt a bit... I've got some special cream to rub in...
Just don't ever try sex for a migraine.
Not much risk of that around here...