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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.
I wonder if it can affect stress. There is some evidence gut bacteria feed stress-inducing whatever back up to the brain via this nerve, and that stress promotes abdominal (inside it) belly fat deposition, as opposed to more distributed body fat deposition, which in turn releases chemicals which cause insulin resistance, which is the main cause of Type II diabetes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_response
I've had one. It felt like my entire nervous system was on fire, followed by aphasia, followed by the worst headache I've ever had, then loss of consciousness.
When I came to, it felt like I had a hangover (not a terrible one, but bad enough).
This would be nice but I don't have much hope for it, there are endless new "devices" like these that don't do jack shit.
Sounds terrible though. My girlfriend works in a headache center oddly enough, the stories I hear at the end of the day are disturbing.
Two of their patients have committed suicide in the last month, drug overdose.
Actually it makes a lot of sense since the nerves on the neck have lot of "bandwidth" already and getting access there is a lot less invasive than opening up the head to get at the brain (until we get better at Brain-Machine Interface but that really does seem a lot harder than "hacking" at the neck).
Sorry for this being buried down at 0, but I've had two episodes of cluster headaches, so I can report on what that's like.
It's the worst pain I've ever experienced, and that's including things like broken bones and accidental burns. The word "headache" isn't really appropriate because most people think of those normal headaches which are annoying and unpleasant but leave you able to function if you need to. It's not even like a migraine - just a whole different order of magnitude.
In a cluster headache, the only thing in your entire world, the only thing that matters at all, is for it to stop. In the moment, I'd have gladly traded decades off my lifespan in exchange for making it stop. Thankfully I haven't had an episode in many years. But I understand well how people who have it happen routinely would consider suicide as an alternative to that.
Oh, another thing I remembered in addition to my comment above: the "cluster" nature makes them worse in a way. There's no way to sleep, so you will be awake as long as the episode lasts. But one will hit, and then fade. When it faded I was exhausted (plus it was 3am or something) and needed to sleep, but just as I'd start to drift off, it was like suddenly someone rammed a knife up inside my sinus passages and behind my eye. And it starts over again. You have no idea how many times it will happen.
Some people sit and hold their head and rock back and forth. All I could do was squeeze my head, wail, and pace frantically back and forth across the room, for some reason.
False dichotomy: The correct answer is (c) because of the abject, utter failure that is science "journalism."
Reality of so many of these breakthroughs: "This chemical cocktail, when given to a mouse cell line that models a certain kind of human cancer, shows significant anti-cancer activity with lower than usual toxicity." This is good, keep on it folks.
However, enter breathless reporting from jism-splattered keyboard: "Oh my god, scientists at $university make cancer-curing breakthrough that completely destroys tumors in tests!"
Later on: "Scientists, y u no cure cancer?!?!"
Everything that can be treated by "stimulating" the vagus nerve indicates that there is a problem with the vagus nerve. And that is in 99% of all cases a blockade/pressure by a muscle or sinew pressing on the nerve somewhere along the path that nerve is running.
And that can be treated easily with:
o heat
o massage
o simple herbal medicals like Camphor/Arnika
o Tai Chi
o Chi Gong
o Osteopathy
o Chiropractics
o Shiatsu/Accu pressure massage
Depending on where the blockade is and how difficult to treat it is.
Main reasons are: very bad body posture and lack of sports and physical activity.
I doubt an implant can long term fight against those two main reasons for illness/malfunction.
Heck, even a simple dance class where people learn to relax the hips and stay erected with relaxed shoulders would likely solve more than 50% of the cases suffering from vagus nerve blockades.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.