Chronic Pain

Acupuncture eases some kinds of chronic pain - and it's not just a placebo effect at work, researchers who looked at data from nearly 18,000 patients found. An estimated 3 million American adults get acupuncture treatments annually; still, there “remains considerable controversy as to its value,” the researchers wrote in a study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine. But they found that for back and neck pain, chronic headache, osteoarthritis and shoulder pain, acupuncture works better than no treatment and better than “sham” acupuncture - done, for example, with needles inserted superficially or with needles that retract into the handles instead of going into the skin.

Scientists in Norway have more good news for coffee drinkers. Researchers have already found evidence that the drink -- or the beans it's brewed from -- can help with weight loss , reduce one's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease or dementia, boost muscle growth , protect against certain types of cancers, and can even reduce one's risk of premature death , among many other benefits . Now comes word that a cuppa joe reduces physical...

A 19-year-old North Hollywood High School student who broke his neck during a football tryout practice has won a $2.4-million arbitration award against the Los Angeles Unified School District. Johnny Rider suffered a five-way cervical spine fracture during a running back drill on July 8, 2008, for which he and other students were not provided helmets or other protective gear. LAUSD admitted liability for failing to provide protective equipment and acknowledged the football tryout was "unauthorized and unsupervised," according to a statement from Browne Greene, Rider's attorney.

Oh, Adrian Monk, what have you wrought? When Andy Breckman nudged his OCD-plagued detective onto the screen in 2002, no one could have predicted the long-term, still-resonating effect Tony Shalhoub's Mr. Monk would have on an unsuspecting nation. Running for eight years, "Monk" not only made Shalhoub a permanent fixture on the Emmy roll call (nominated eight times, won three) but the quirky detective procedural also helped USA, once best known for game show reruns and "Silk Stalkings," become one of the most consistently entertaining and certainly best branded of the basic cable channels.

Pain is a hard thing to measure, and also quite mysterious: Two people may experience very similar injuries and similar levels of initial pain, but where one may recover the other may go on to experience a crippling chronic condition.   Why does pain persist for some but not others? Scientists at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine took an interesting look at this. Their work, just published in the journal Nature Neuroscience , tracked brain activity in 40 people with new back injuries and found a pattern of activity that could predict -- with 85% accuracy -- which patients were destined to develop chronic pain and which weren't.

A Northridge doctor's license was suspended Thursday after medical authorities found that he had been injecting his daughter at home with propofol, the same drug that killed pop star Michael Jackson. Robert S. Markman, a retired anesthesiologist, constructed a treatment area in his adult daughter's "filthy" house, in a bedroom she rarely left, the Medical Board of California alleged in a ruling on an interim suspension order made public Thursday. Markman, according to the board's order, injected his daughter, referred to only as L.M., with the surgical anesthetic about 500 times over five years.

The sunny fact that Americans are living longer, more productive lives has a dark side: More of us than ever live with chronic illnesses that are not only a drag on sufferers' time and energy, but on the nation's pocketbook. The Institute of Medicine on Tuesday put a dollar figure on the cost of caring for chronic illness in the United States--$1.5 trillion yearly, fully three-fourths of annual healthcare spending. A panel of experts called on policymakers to do more to prevent and track the big nine chronic diseases that most drain the nation's wallet.

Chronic pain is usually thought of as a problem affecting adults. But a new study shows that chronic pain is also highly prevalent in children and that more kids today suffer from pain compared with two decades ago. Researchers in Nova Scotia analyzed data from 41 studies on pain in children published since 1991,which was the last time such an analysis was completed. They found that chronic pain conditions are more common in girls than boys and that pain problems tend to increase with age. Headache is the most common type of chronic pain in kids, with 23% of children age7 to 18 reporting weekly headaches and 5% reporting daily headaches.

Seeing the movements of a healthy hand mirroring one's own movements plays a welcome trick on the brains of arthritis sufferers, a new study shows: It reduces the perception of pain. The observation, reported this week at the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference , could offer a safe, inexpensive means of dampening chronic pain by enlisting the brain's power of suggestion. The small  arthritis study, which tested just eight subjects, comes from the lab of UC San Diego neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran -- who first used mirror-based trickery to treat phantom-limb pain in patients who have had an amputation.

A sunburn’s hot and aching soreness is difficult to ease, even after slathering on aloe vera, and especially when tossing and turning at night. Now researchers say they’ve found a protein responsible for this inflammatory pain. Targeting this molecule could eventually lead to new ways to relieve not only soreness from too much time at the beach but also other types of chronic pain. To reach their conclusion, researchers burned tiny patches of skin on human volunteers with UVB light (the type of radiation classically associated with skin cancer)