If you’re experiencing your first really bad backache, you’re probably panicking a little about the pain and its implications — what if it’s cancer? What if it never goes away? My first piece of advice is, relax. Low back pain is very common, and 95% of the time, it’s neither permanent nor serious. Following are 10 essential things to …
Pain
Chronic Fatigue in Teens: Rare but Serious
It’s not unusual for teens to stay home from school for a day or two if they’re feeling under the weather. But in some uncommon cases, debilitating symptoms — such as joint pain and exhaustion — persist.
House Watch: What Causes Back Pain?
Like last week’s episode, this week’s House M.D. stuck to the formula that has worked so well for the series these past 6.5 seasons: medical mystery, a flurry of possible diagnoses — more than any episode this season, I …
FDA Cuts Acetaminophen Dose In Opioid Painkillers
Though most people don’t know it, the acetaminophen (better known by its brand name Tylenol) can often be the most deadly ingredient in prescription pain medications that contain opioids like codeine.
Study: Treatment Success for Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) has always been a bit of a mystery.
No Pain, Little Brain: Anesthesia Is More Like Coma Than Sleep
Every day, some 60,000 patients enter a state more like coma than sleep when they undergo general anesthesia — according to an unsettling study published Dec. 30 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Mind Over Matter: Can Zen Meditation Help You Forget About Pain?
Living without pain may not require potent drugs, according to a new study published in the medical journal Pain — all you need is a cushion, a quiet corner and maybe a mantra.
Study: Acupuncture May Change the Way the Brain Perceives Pain
The idea of pricking your body with needles in order to relieve pain seems nothing if not counterintuitive, but thousands of acupuncture patients swear the treatments are effective in addressing pain of all kinds.
Suffer from Migraines? FDA Says Try Botox Injections
It began as an odd observation among plastic surgery patients, and ended up as an FDA approved drug — on Friday, the agency green-lighted the use of Botox, a popular wrinkle-reducing procedure, to control migraines.
Forget Pain Pills, Fall in Love Instead
Do you believe that love conquers all? If you do, you probably won’t be surprised by the following study. It turns out that being in love can actually dull pain perception. What’s more, it works in a different way that painkillers do.
Acupuncture: A 2,000-year tradition of placebo effect?
Acupuncture has been — how shall we say? — one of the less ridiculed techniques of alternative medicine, at least in recent years. A body of evidence shows that it does indeed relieve pain, for many conditions. But a study released today suggests that acupuncture probably only works because patients believe that it will — and it’s the …
Asthma and Tylenol: How strong is the evidence?
Yet another new study — this one is in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine — is showing a link between asthma and acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Researchers have found that, among 320,000 kids in 50 countries, 13- and 14-year-olds who take acetaminophen are more than twice as likely to have …
Menstrual pain can re-shape the brain
It’s a common gag that women don’t think quite the same they get their period. But according to neuroscientists in Taiwan, in some women menstruation may change the very structure of the brain.
In an MRI study of 32 women who suffer menstrual cramps and 32 similar women without pain — with members of the two groups matched on age and …