Slashdot Mirror
Hacking Your Body Through a Nerve In Your Neck
agent elevator writes: IEEE Spectrum has a feature (part of its Hacking the Human OS issue) on the future of vagus nerve stimulation, a device-based therapy with the potential to treat a ridiculously wide variety of ailments: epilepsy, depression, stroke, tinnitus, heart failure, migraines, asthma, the list goes on. One problem is that, because it required an implant (a bit like a pacemaker), it was never anybody's first-choice therapy. But now there's a non-invasive version, a device you just hold to your neck twice a day for a few minutes. It's being trialed first for migraines and cluster headaches (which sound horrible). If it works, vagus nerve stimulation could compete directly with drug treatments on cost and convenience and it would let doctors find new ways to hack human physiology.
I hear medical breakthroughs like this all the time, where a cheap simple device will replace expensive drugs. Then nothing happens and it's not heard of again.
Is it because A. it doesn't work as well as inventors hoped or has too many side effects, or B. pharma industry silences them by killing them or paying them to hush it up? Help me out here.
Certain conditions don't actually harm your body, but your brain just recieves input that they are causing harm. Stop the input, stop the brain from getting that input, no more chronic condition?
In 1997, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of VNS as an adjunctive therapy for partial-onset epilepsy. In 2005, the FDA approved the use of VNS for treatment-resistant depression.[2]
Although the use of VNS for refractory depression has been endorsed by the American Psychiatric Association, the FDA's approval of VNS for refractory depression remains controversial. According to Dr. A. John Rush, vice chairman for research in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, results of the VNS pilot study showed that 40 percent of the treated patients displayed at least a 50 percent or greater improvement in their condition, according to the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale.[3][4] Many other studies concur that VNS is indeed efficacious in treating depression. However, these findings do not take into account improvements over time in patients without the device. In the only randomized controlled trial VNS failed to perform any better when turned on than in otherwise similar implanted patients whose device was not turned on.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The mechanisms behind the beneficial effects of vagus nerve stimulation are still being explored, but many researchers believe that timing is important. Precise timing is something difficult, if not impossible, to achieve using drugs - they take awhile to become active. Once active, they remain active for hours or days, and then they slowly decline.
VNS, as well as other methods of neural stimulation, can be applied very precisely in the time domain, allowing for a timed release of neuromodulators into the brain that can influence brain plasticity. Although not all VNS research includes timing as an important issue, a large body of the research focuses on this element of it.
Here's one paper: http://journals.lww.com/neuror...