Which bioenergy therapies are common in Western medicine? When working with bioenergies, Western medicine generally applies external energy sources to patients to enact a change, the most common forms being electrical or thermal. The application of heat via thermal therapy or cold via cryotherapy is very popular in spite of a lack of evidence in …
Which bioenergy therapies are common in Western medicine Read More »
What constitutes bioenergetic therapy? Bioenergetic therapies aim to balance the energy of the body through a mixture of exercise, energy manipulation, and diet based on the teachings of TCM, Western medical practices, and Ayurveda. Some methods involve practitioners directly manipulating the energy of their patients, such as therapeutic touch, which transfers energy from caregiver to …
Complementary and Alternative medical Treatment Pinning down what constitutes the field of complementary or alternative medicine (CAM) is complicated by the constantly shifting nature of the field; therapies evolve and change over time, and some become incorporated into mainstream medicine. The integration of what has once been considered alternative or complementary can be seen in …
Mechanism of placebo analgesia Several years ago it was reported that the opiate antagonist naloxone can reverse the analgesia produced by a placebo. This led to the hypothesis that placebo analgesia involves release of endorphins and activation of an endogenous pain control circuit. This striking finding has received considerable support in recent studies in which …
Cortical mechanism underlying the sensory and emotional components of the pain experience PET studies mentioned in Question 25 also examined what occurs during hypnotic analgesia. When subjects were hypnotized so as to decrease the unpleasantness generated by a heat stimulus, the “activity” generated in the anterior cingulate gyrus was dramatically decreased, but without significant change …
Is there a cortical representation of pain? Yes, there is a cortical representation of pain. Traditional teaching suggested that the cortex was not necessary for the experience of pain. This was based on clinical studies wherein stimulation rarely produced pain and large lesions did not completely disrupt the pain experience. However, imaging studies with positron …
Regions of the thalamus that have been implicated in the processing of nociceptive information Two major regions of thalamus have been implicated in the processing of nociceptive information: (1) the lateral thalamus, including the ventral posterolateral (VPL) and ventral posteromedial nuclei (VPM), and (2) the intralaminar nuclei of the medial thalamus. The VPL receives input …