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Chronic Pain In The Brain Analysis

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Sean Mackey is a M.D, Ph.D, the current Chief of the Division of Pain Medicine, as well as a Redlich professor in several pain and brain related sciences at Stanford. Doctor Mackey leads the research at the Stanford Systems Neuroscience and Pain Laboratory focusing on the dissecting chronic pain and how it effects the nervous system. The SNAPL has also attempted to map out the brain and regions in the spinal cord that understand pain in order to treat these occurrences of chronic pain on a personal level (Stanford Medicine Bio). In order to solve these problems he is mainly explores the effects of different injected drugs, such as Lidocaine, Ondansetron, and Botulinum Toxin, for ameliorating effects or help in linking how different responders …show more content…

After reading these papers I think they are both good lenses to understand his topic of how pain originates in the brain. The first provides a more traditional science approach to brains relationship with chronic pain. Although it does not give a definitive answer to how the brain causes CRPS, or complex regional pain syndrome, it presents some morphological proof. This experiment proceeded as follows, Mackey received 15 patients with right handed upper extremity CRPS and then 15 control patents with the same age. The severity of the disease for each of the patients was assessed and then the patients were scanned using a 3.0 Tesla MRI machine using a 3D I-FSGR sequence to produce high-resolution T1- weighted anatomic images. These images were used to find the volumes of grey brain matter and reach some interesting points. Most importantly I think is that morphologic abnormalities that were discovered in the left posterior hippocampus and left …show more content…

This study focused on the brain shielding the body from pain, a reflection of the first paper, and provides the other side to my view of his topic. In this paper he explains how he had 27 individuals in the first 9 months of a romantic relationship go through a series of pain trials where they were exposed to a heat block at various thresholds. While the pain was being applied they were told to focus in on a picture, either of their romantic partner or an equally attractive acquaintance, then they were told to rate their pain. The results really surprised me that it can be quantitatively determined that the pain they felt was less when viewing their partners. Mackey describes it as an analgesia affect, the brain dampening the nerves that would transmit the pain to the brain when view ones romantic partner. Many controls were put in place to make their experiment clear, for example the acquaintances and partners were rated equally attractive by a third party, the patients completed a mind-wiping arithmetic exercise after each trial, the pain scale for each patient was determined earlier through an empty trail and the skin area was cooled after

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