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 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.
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.