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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 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.
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 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.
Anyone smarter than me who can comment on if marijuana affects the vagus nerve? The list of ailments allegedly cured seems similar and both the vagus nerve and marijuana are not completely understood.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
"What could go wrong!"
Louis Wu, is that you?
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).
What happens in vagus stays in vagus.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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."
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).
Battery cartridges made by HP's inkjet division.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
I heard a story about a nun who had anorgasmia- meaning she couldn't experience pleasure of any sort (not just sexual). Someone did VNS surgery on her and had the implant send pulses to her pleasure center. That produced major changes- she was super happy, quit being a nun, decided to become a prostitute, and went to Venezuela(?). Eventually her pleasure center couldn't take being hammered by electricity anymore and she started to find it annoying. Eventually she had them remove it.
If alternative medicine worked then it would not be alternative medicine. It would just be, you know, medicine.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.