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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.
As someone who suffers from chronic near-continuous headaches that's a seemingly random mix of migraine, cluster, and tension for over 20 years (at least I dodged sinus - woohoo!), this is exciting. I had just started down the road of getting an implant in my neck/shoulder a while back - I was a good candidate but it got put on hold with switching insurance then decided to give another less invasive options another try.
If I could ditch my medicines and their side effects as well as cut my pain, I would be unbelievably elated.
I wonder if that would count as prior art if a patent is applied for.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Seriously, severe migraine sufferers and those who suffer from cluster headaches need all the tools we can give them. As noted, if you really read about cluster headaches, it is truly shocking. It is noted sufferers are at a high risk for suicide; after I read what they go through, I was surprised that it is not even higher.
I suffered from migraines, but on the mild to moderate scale. I was lucky, I found a preventative regimen that works very, very well for me. For those with more severe cases, I do hope this is a successful treatment option.
Any time a single device (or drug, or supplement, or treatment) purports to treat a wide variety of seemingly unrelated ailments, your first instinct should be heavy skepticism. Also, when a device purports to work for ailments that have soft endpoints and are amenable to placebo effect, you should evaluate any study carefully. The literature is filled with studies that purport to show promising results, only to collapse when more rigorous methods are applied.
With the exception of stroke and heart failure, this is a list of ailments that are commonly targeted by scam medicine, because they are conditions that will often be self-reported as improved no matter what the intervention. When more rigorous measurements are applied, these effects tend to evaporate.
Let's hope it works, but let's look for some well done studies too.
Then you should see the number of (anecdotal) successful uses of plain sugar or even water!
Or one could skip such things and use actual science for our cures...