Should doctors use Sudoku instead of morphine? Mental distraction can PHYSICALLY reduce pain

RSS Feed

Should doctors use Sudoku instead of morphine? Mental distraction can PHYSICALLY reduce pain

May 18th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

By
Tamara Cohen

PUBLISHED:

11:00 EST, 17 May 2012

|

UPDATED:

18:58 EST, 17 May 2012

Can puzzles reduce pain? University of Hamburg scientists carried out scanning studies which showed how a distracting memory test blocked incoming pain signals

Can puzzles reduce pain? Researchers have found the body really does repel pain signals

Anyone who has stubbed their toe will tell you it’s a matter of mind over matter when dealing with the agony.

But researchers have found the body really does repel pain signals when we concentrate on something else.

Using scanning technology, they were able to show that distracted people can push away pain signals coming in from the top of the spinal cord to the upper regions of the brain.

Volunteers were asked to complete either a hard or easy letter memory task while having a painful level of heat applied to their arms.

While distracted by the harder task, they perceived less pain.

This was reflected by lower activity in the spinal cord which could be seen in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.

‘The results demonstrate that this phenomenon is not just a psychological phenomenon, but an active neuronal mechanism reducing the amount of pain signals ascending from the spinal cord to higher-order brain regions,’ said study leader Dr Christian Sprenger, from the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany.

The findings are reported online in the journal Current Biology.

Giving the volunteers the opioid-blocking drug naloxone reduced the pain-relieving effect of distraction by 40 per cent.

Researchers were able to show that distracted people can push away pain signals coming in from the top of the spinal cord to the upper regions of the brain

This was evidence that endogenous opioids – the brain’s natural equivalent of morphine – played an essential role.

‘Our findings strengthen the role of cognitive-behavioural therapeutic approaches in the treatment of pain diseases, as it could be extrapolated that these approaches might also have the potential to alter the underlying neurobiological mechanisms as early as in the spinal cord,’ the researchers wrote.