Entries from February 2010 ↓

If you ask any cat or dog owner, they will tell the animals are one of the family. Talk to them for a while and they will strike you as happy and well-adjusted. This might not seem significant but continuing medical research has detected a significant trend. This is not just your neighbor. It’s the majority of people who keep a pet. The most recent piece of research was presented to the International Society of Anthrozoology conference held in Kansas City this October by a team from Loyola University of Chicago.

They were testing the hypothesis that the use of dogs in a hospital environment would represent a beneficial therapy, promoting faster healing and a better rehabilitation following joint replacement surgery. Some of you will be convinced that dogs are the equivalent of disease carriers and believe they should never be allowed into a hopefully relatively sterile hospital. After all, dogs are barred from most eating places. Allowing animals into public spaces is a balancing of risks and benefits. Hospitals are not as clean as we might believe and dogs do not make what is often a bad situation any worse. In fact, their presence is proving to be great therapy and the benefits of admission now significantly outweigh keeping them out. Continue reading →

There is always a point where science collides with belief systems and sparks fly. Looking around the US right now, the continuing confrontation over the teaching of evolution is a classic example. At a slightly lower level of intensity is the continuing conflict between the “hard science” doctors and those who are persuaded that there are alternative approaches to treatment with equally good outcomes. Take acupuncture as an example. This comes out of nearly two thousand years of medical experience in China. Even though some of the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) methods have been displaced in favor of Western methods, the healthcare service in many Asian and ASEAN countries continues to rely on acupuncture as an effective treatment for a range of different problems. Putting TCM to one side, there are also major claims made for different forms of meditation. Some are explicitly rooted in religions. Others are directly adapted to the management of pain. Unfortunately, the Enlightenment and the adoption of the scientific method by Western doctors leads them to a quick dismissal of everything not backed up by their science. Even when shown perfectly respectable research proving some of the claims for “unscientific” methods, they still refuse to even consider them. Their prejudices are deep-seated.

In the case of meditation, there is a growing body of Western-based research using the scientific method which shows excellent outcomes when people suffering from chronic pain are taught how to meditate. In essence, the point is to change the attitude of people towards their pain. Put another way: the level of intensity of the pain stays the same but the people change their emotional reaction to it. At some level, this represents a form of intellectual distraction. People are trained how to disconnect themselves from the pain and to search for ways to live their lives without worrying about it. Too often, people allow the pain to dominate their every waking moments. They fear the pain will always be there and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that blights their lives. Avoiding this fear and focussing instead on positive ways to cope with the reality of the pain allows people to rebuild their daily lives and to function more effectively. Continue reading →