Music On Prescription Could Help To Treat Emotional And Physical Pain
Archives
All entries, chronologically...
Depression may have more far-reaching consequences than previously believed. Recent data suggests that individuals who suffer from a mood disorder could be twice as likely to have a heart attack compared to individuals who are not depressed. This process has been poorly understood — until now. A new study led by Concordia University has found that depressed individuals have a slower recovery time after exercise compared to those who are non-depressed.
A recent study of obese volunteers participating in a 12-week dietary weight-loss program found that successful weight losers had significantly higher resting nerve activity compared to weight-loss resistant individuals. The study was accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).
Competitive athletes should not only practice their sport to improve performance; perhaps they should also practice heart rate variability (HRV). Studies have shown that learning to increase heart rate variability through biofeedback can improve sport performance and help athletes cope with the stress of competition. A link to download the original study is included in this report.
The persistent fatigue that plagues one out of every three breast cancer survivors may be caused by one part of the autonomic nervous system running in overdrive, while the other part fails to slow it down. That imbalance of a natural system in the body appears linked to the tiredness and exhaustion that can burden cancer patients as much as a decade after their successful treatment.
In 2004, I introduced the concept of the “bridge.” Since that time, this author and others have been working with bridges to understand their significance in facilitating conscious influence of the body/mind. Humans, in fact vertebrate life in general, interact with the environment via fifteen bodily functions or “interfaces”. These input/output functions include the eyes, the nose, the lips, the jaw, the ears, the tongue, the throat (larynx and glottis), the hands, the breasts, the diaphragm, the urethral sphincter, the vaginal sphincter, the anal sphincter, the feet, and the skin.
Fear of free radicals may be exaggerated, according to scientists from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet. A new study, published in The Journal of Physiology, shows that free radicals act as signal substances that cause the heart to beat with the correct force.
In Part 1 of this 2-part series, I provide an overview of pain tolerance, factors that affect pain tolerance, and assessment of clinical pain. Today’s Part 2 focuses on a detailed discussion of several guided imagery and healing techniques, such as “Mind Controlled Analgesia,” positive and negative imagery, and the importance of relaxation. Readers are encouraged to first review Part 1 to better understand the topics explored in this second and final discussion of pain and guided imagery.
“Coherence”, a measure of the consistency of wave phenomena, is often used in the context of the heart beat. Here, it can pertain to the beat itself, i.e. the physical consistency of consecutive beats where each beat is a wave, or it can pertain to the longer term cycle of variation in the heart beat. Note that the latter is not itself a wave but a mathematical abstraction of the heart beat rate. Yet, when breathing slowly, deeply, and rhythmically, the abstraction certainly resembles a wave – why?
Psychologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) have shown that the nature of a social interaction has the ability to influence an individual’s sensitivity to physical pain. The discovery could have significant clinical implications for doctor-patient relationships and the general well-being of an individual on a daily basis. Terry Borsook, a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at U of T is the author of this new study, which will be published in the journal Pain.
In physics, “coherence” is a complex measure of wave phenomena. Specifically, its a measure of the correlation between all of the physical properties of waves, e.g., amplitude, phase, and frequency. If two perfectly “coherent” waves collide, waves that are exact in every respect, they will negate each other perfectly, this “stationary interference” being proof positive of their exactness or “coherence”. Another way to think of it is if we take two perfectly coherent waves, invert one, and add them, the result is exactly “zero”.
