Conservatives launching billion-dollar free market in medical marijuana - The Globe and Mail
The Conservative government is launching a $1.3-billion free market in medical marijuana this Tuesday, eventually providing an expected 450,000 Canadians with quality weed.
Health Canada is phasing out an older system on Monday that mostly relied on small-scale, homegrown medical marijuana of varying quality, often diverted illegally to the black market.
In its place, large indoor marijuana farms certified by the RCMP and health inspectors will produce, package and distribute a range of standardized weed, all of it sold for whatever price the market will bear. The first sales are expected in the next few weeks, delivered...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 30, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
HealthBoards - Fibromyalgia and Pain Management
Dealing with a medical condition is often difficult. Connecting with others who are going through the same thing can make a world of difference. HealthBoards.com is where you can make those connections. HealthBoards provides a unique one-stop support group community offering over 200 message boards on various diseases, conditions, and health topics. The HealthBoards community is one of the largest and most dynamic on the Web, with over 10 million monthly visitors, 850,000 registered members, and over 4.5 million messages posted. HealthBoards was rated as one of the top 20 health information websites by Consumer R...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 27, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain - NIH
The ChallengeChronic pain is a major public health problem, and treatments are limited. More research is needed to fully understand how acute pain evolves into chronic pain, and who will transition from acute to chronic pain. The Blueprint Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain seeks to shed light on the molecular, cellular and circuit-level changes – or neuroplasticity – underlying chronic pain. A key element of the program is to form research collaborations between experts on pain and experts on neuroplasticity.Mechanisms of SupportThe Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain supports research through:Multi-PI R01 gra...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 26, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
How Does Acute Pain Become Chronic? | NIH Director's Blog
Chronic pain is a major medical problem, affecting as many as 100 million Americans, robbing them of a full sense of well-being, disrupting their ability to work and earn a living, and causing untold suffering for the patient and family. This condition costs the country an estimated $560-635 billion annually—a staggering economic burden [1]. Worst of all, chronic pain is often resistant to treatment. NIH launched the Grand Challenge on Chronic Pain [2] to investigate how acute pain (which is part of daily experience) evolves into a chronic condition and what biological factors contribute to this transition.But you m...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 26, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Pain (sensation) - Quora
About Pain (sensation)This is a topic about the pain people feel when they get physically hurt. It's not about emotional pain.http://www.quora.com/Pain-sensationRelated:http://www.quora.com/Kate-Simmons/Seeking-Comfort (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 23, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
How a salt jab could be more effective for lower back pain than steroids | Mail Online
A saline injection in the spine could be more effective than steroids for treating lower back pain, a new study has revealed.
Spinal pain is a leading cause of disability in the industrialised world and epidural steroid injections - the most common nonsurgical treatment - have been the standard treatment for more than 50 years.
Yet the alternative spinal injection in the space around the spinal cord may provide better relief than steroids which can have adverse side effects.
Steroids raise blood sugar in diabetic back patients, slow the healing of wounds and accelerate bone disease in older women, the Johns Hopkins Univ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 23, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Pain and its Meanings - Wellcome Collection
Nearly everyone has experienced bodily pain, yet describing it is notoriously difficult. In 1930, Virginia Woolf lamented that even a schoolgirl, "when she falls in love, has Shakespeare and Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry".Is pain really so difficult to articulate? Or can it actually generate creative expression? If so, what do these narratives tell us about the meaning of pain? Some believe it has the power to purge sin; others interpret it as an unjust punishment. Pain can even be regarded as intrinsic to achieveme...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 23, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Perspectives on Pain - 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth, No 15 (2012)
This issue of 19, guest edited by Louise Hide, Joanna Bourke, and Carmen Mangion, examines the meaning of pain - for sufferers, physicians, and other witnesses - in the nineteenth century. Articles by social and cultural historians, and by literary scholars, discuss the implications of shifting discourses in personal narratives, in religious communities, and in philosophical, medical, and psychiatric texts. Analysing language in the diverse theories of the period, this issue extends and deepens our understanding of the complex interaction between the body, mind, and culture in order to gain insight into the ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 23, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
The Story of Pain: Joanna Bourke - Oxford University Press in press
The Story of Pain: From Prayer to PainkillersJoanna Bourke • The story of pain and suffering since the eighteenth century • Addresses the big questions about the experience and nature of suffering - and how to respond to it • Charts how our understanding of pain has changed completely over the last three centuries - from positive function to ultimate evil • A fascinating investigation for the 21st century reader into how we have coped with suffering in the past - both our own suffering and that of the ones we loveEveryone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, mi...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 23, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Girl who feels no pain could inspire new painkillers - health - 15 September 2013 - New Scientist
A girl who does not feel physical pain has helped researchers identify a gene mutation that disrupts pain perception. The discovery may spur the development of new painkillers that will block pain signals in the same way.People with congenital analgesia cannot feel physical pain and often injure themselves as a result – they might badly scald their skin, for example, through being unaware that they are touching something hot.By comparing the gene sequence of a girl with the disorder against those of her parents, who do not, Ingo Kurth at Jena University Hospital in Germany and his colleagues identified a m...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 16, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Neuroscientists Identify a Brain Signature of Pain: Scientific American
Like truth and beauty, pain is subjective and hard to pin down. What hurts one moment might not register the next, and our moods and thoughts color the experience of pain. According to a report in April in the New England Journal of Medicine, however, researchers may one day be able to measure the experience of pain by scanning the brain—a much needed improvement over the subjective ratings of between one and 10 that patients are currently asked to give.Led by neuroscientist Tor Wager of the University of Colorado at Boulder, researchers used functional MRI on healthy participants who were given heated touches to th...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 11, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Neuropeptide May Be Biomarker for Chronic Migraine
Levels of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), a neurotransmitter that causes vasodilation, are elevated in the peripheral blood of women with chronic migraine (CM), and to a lesser extent in women with episodic migraine, compared with levels in healthy controls without a history of headache, new research reveals.The study shows, for the first time, increased CGRP levels in patients with CM outside migraine attacks and in the absence of medication for symptoms.The results suggest that CGRP levels could be used as a biomarker for permanent trigeminovascular activation and therefore help diagnose chronic migraine. Until n...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 28, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Bacteria can cause pain on their own | Genes & Cells | Science News
Bacteria can directly trigger the nerves that sense pain, suggesting that the body's own immune reaction is not always to blame for the extra tenderness of an infected wound. In fact, mice with staph-infected paws showed signs of pain even before immune cells had time to arrive at the site, researchers report online August 21 in Nature.
"Most people think that when they get pain during infection it's due to the immune system," says coauthor Isaac Chiu of Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Indeed, immune cells do release pain-causing molecules while fighting off invading microbes. ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 22, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
The Color of Pain | Illusion Chasers, Scientific American Blog Network
Want to know an effective way to reduce pain from burns? Cover the affected red area, so you are unable to look at it. Ideally, use a blue bandage. Painfully hot stimuli applied to red skin feel more painful than applied to blue skin, a new research article published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience shows.The scientists, Matteo Martini, Daniel Perez-Marcos and Maria Victoria Sanchez-Vives from the University of Barcelona, used immersive virtual reality in combination with the application of real heat stimuli to the wrists of experimental subjects. Participants saw their virtual arms get increasingly red, ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 17, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Throbbing pain isn’t a matter of the heart, UF researchers find » News » University of Florida
Throbbing pain may pound like a heartbeat, but University of Florida scientists have discovered the sensation is all in your head, or more precisely, in your brain waves.The finding could drastically change how researchers look for therapies that can ease pain, said Dr. Andrew Ahn, a neurologist at the UF College of Medicine, a part of UF Health. Ahn and his colleagues reported their findings in the July issue of the journal Pain."Aristotle linked throbbing pain to heart rhythm 2,300 years ago," Ahn said. "It took two millennia to discover that his presumption was wrong."People who have experienced a toothache or...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 14, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
