An experimental drug that once made the headlines as the “couch potato pill”, for its capacity to mimic the effects of exercise in sedentary mice, may have another use, as a way to protect against heat stroke…

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $2.4 million to Allina Hospitals & Clinics to study the impact of integrative and mind/body therapies on pain management for patients at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, Minn. The Penny George Institute for Health and Healing and the Center for Healthcare Innovation at Allina received the grant and will conduct the study…

Meditation produces powerful pain-relieving effects in the brain, according to new research published in the April 6 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience. “This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D…

Although acupuncture is commonly used for pain control, doubts about its effectiveness and safety remain. Investigators from the Universities of Exeter & Plymouth (Exeter, UK) and the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine (Daejeon, South Korea) critically evaluated systematic reviews of acupuncture as a treatment of pain in order to explore this question…

Retired NFL players use painkillers at a much higher rate than the rest of us, according to new research conducted by investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The researchers say the brutal collisions and bone-jarring injuries associated with football often cause long-term pain, which contributes to continued use and abuse of painkilling medications…

Zen meditation has many health benefits, including a reduced sensitivity to pain. According to new research from the Université de Montréal, meditators do feel pain but they simply don’t dwell on it as much. These findings, published in the month’s issue of Pain, may have implications for chronic pain sufferers, such as those with arthritis, back pain or cancer…

When doctors want their patients asleep during surgery they gently turn the gas tap. But Anaesthetic gasses have a global warming potential as high as a refrigerant that is on its way to be banned in the EU. Yet there is no obligation to report anaesthetic gasses along with other greenhouse gasses such as CO2, refrigerants and laughing gas…

As the song says, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, and now researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that the sights and sounds of chirping birds, ribbiting frogs and water trickling downstream can ease the substantial pain of bone marrow extraction in one of five people who must endure it…

Patients with osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee or hip who adhere to the recommended home physical therapy exercises and physically active lifestyle experience more improvement in pain, physical function, and self-perceived effect according to a study from researchers in The Netherlands…

The Sacramento Bee/The Seattle Times: The “choices that anesthesiologists make at a midsize hospital can have the carbon footprint of a small fleet of automobiles, according to a physician who calculated the effects of different options.” Anesthesiologists as a result are trying to lessen the environmental impact of the tools of their trade…