spine
edyong | October 15, 2009The placebo effect - the phenomenon where fake medicines sometimes work if a patient believes that they should - is a boon to quacks the world over. Why it happens is still a medical mystery but thanks to a new study, we have confirmation that the spine is involved.
Frank Eippert from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf used a technique caled functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the backbones of volunteers as they experienced the placebo effect. Eippert heated the recruits' forearms to the point of pain and he gave them cream to soothe the sting. The creams were…
esiegel | April 28, 2008Old man Dave writes to me about his back problems:
The spine. I want to know about the spine. I know you are not that kind of PHD but still……. I’ve had back problems most of my adult life. It seems to me if we were “intelligently” designed that we might have a more efficient, and less troubling, method of uprightedness…. given the way the spine is constucted isn’t it possible that we were not “made” to walk upright??
Well, the spine goes back a long time, Dave, long before you were busting yours trying to lift things with your back instead of your legs. (You know better, Dave!) There are…