The latest in medicinal tonics

Do you suffer from chronic pain? panic attacks? crippling anxiety? Anneli Rufus reports that a cure may be on the way: Prescription LSD!

Leading this wave is the Boston-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)... MAPS researchers have spent 15 years conducting international clinical trials whose results indicate that LSD and psilocybin counteract depression and anxiety and are effective pain-management tools while MDMA (ecstasy) conquers fear. Just this month, the Israeli Ministry of Health approved a new MAPS study using MDMA to treat PTSD.

Note that scientists are not saying that you can "recover by hitting a few raves." The drugs should instead be administered by professionals in "a safe, supportive, controlled setting."
To read the full story, see Why Prescription Ecstasy or LSD Could Happen Much Sooner Than You Think

Art and Brain Trauma?

Reporting for the New York Times, Dr. Abigail Zuger tells the story of Jon Sarkin, a chiropractor in Massachusetts who was plagued by a "high-pitched screech" that doctors shrugged off as "a vague abonormality near a nerve at the base of the brain that controls hearing and balance."

Maddened by the ceaseless racket, Dr. Sarkin underwent surgery to correct the problem, only to wind up in a coma. The man who emerged from the coma bore little resemblance to the man who fell into it several months before.

He was physically delicate and walked with a cane, but that was the least of it. His personality had morphed into a difficult teenager's: self-centered, unreliable, obsessive.

He also began to draw. Now, twenty years later, he has become "a full-fledged artist of some renown" and has sold work to The New York Times Magazine as well a private collectors. What started as a shriek heard only by himself, became unexpectedly transformative.


Read more here.

Alive or dead? And the brain, of course

A person is either alive, or dead, or... in a "middling state," which can be hard to decipher. According to Amber Dance's article for Nature, "Even when a team of doctors agree to diagnose a vegetative state, they have been shown to be wrong more than 40% of the time compared to the a standardized test, the Coma Recovery Scale."

In other words, when the going gets tough, we're not very good at determining whether someone is with us or not.

However, a new test, developed by Melanie Boly and her team at the University of Liège in Belgium, uses an electroencephalogram (EEG), to peer in at the brain, and the results suggest "that the key difference between minimally conscious and totally unconscious non-coma states is communication between the frontal cortex — the planning, thinking part of the brain — and the temporal cortex, where sounds and words are processed."

Here's more:

Boly and her colleagues...used EEG to measure electrical signals from the brains of 8 people in vegetative states, 13 in minimally conscious states and 22 healthy participants. The subjects were played a series of tones, which occasionally changed in pitch. The differing tone constituted a surprising event in the environment — something that the frontal cortex has to consider, so in all subjects the temporal cortex would send the frontal cortex a message.

In minimally conscious and healthy people the frontal cortex would then send a message back to the temporal cortex. The reason for this is uncertain; it may be to let the temporal cortex know what to expect in the future. But for people in a vegetative state, the communication was one-way: signals passed from the temporal to frontal area, but not back.

Interesting stuff. To read even more, see Test measures spark of consciousness

Grey matter turns blue!

Boing Boing recently brought us news of the Blue Brain Project, which is, according to its website:

Reconstructing the brain piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer—these are some of the goals of the Blue Brain Project. The virtual brain will be an exceptional tool giving neuroscientists a new understanding of the brain and a better understanding of neurological diseases.

The team has already successfully simulated a rat cortical column (evidently, there are about 100,000 such columns in the average rat brain). The human brain has more like two million (even more complex) columns.

Constructing a model of the human brain will require a fair amount of computing power:

Each simulated neuron requires the equivalent of a laptop computer. A model of the whole brain would have billions.

The technology of medicine marches forward!

For photos of the team and project, see Blue Brain Project: Build a virtual brain in a supercomputer.

It's all about the marketing

The Scientist has a great story about William Helfand's medical poster collection, which contains thousands of marketing posters and other assorted "marketing paraphernalia" dating back to the 1920s. The article features a poster for Uricure, which depicts a rather deranged looking bearded man holding aloft a small box of the substance. The article explains:

Uricure was a drug purported to improve rheumatism, arthritis, gout, and kidney disorders. The molecular details of the product are unknown, however, as is its therapeutic value.

The posters in the slide show are even more amazing, featuring slogans like, "Weed with roots in hell" and skeletons pouring cups of allegedly curative tonics.

To read the entire article, see Edyta Zielinska's, Medical Posters, circa 1920.

Dr Olaf's not alone! A brain doc with a family history of madness

I just came across an NPR story on neuroscientist James Fallon--a man who, inspired by his mother's comment ("Jim, why don't you find out about your father's relatives? I think there were some cuckoos back there."), began looking into his family history. His finding?

There's a whole lineage of very violent people — killers.

His great-grandfather murdered his mother and was subsequently hanged; another relative (later acquitted) was accused of killing her father and stepmother with an ax. All together, Dr. Fallon found seven alleged murderer relatives.

Dr. Fallon, who has dedicated much of his career to studying the brain of psychopaths, decided to see if any of his living relatives possessed a killer's brain. He scanned his wife, his mother, his siblings, his children, and himself. The only brain scan that revealed an inactive orbital cortex (which he and other scientists believe might lead to troubles with impulse control and moral decision-making) was... his own! He also tested DNA for genes that are associated with violence and discovered that he had "the pattern, the risky pattern. In a sense, I'm a born killer."

Whether his relationship to violence informed his career choice or not, Dr. Fallon reminds me of Dr. Olaf, who struggled to find a cure in the brain for the madness that plagued his family (only Dr. Fallon has had much better time of it!) The internet reveals that he has branched out to study the brains of dictators as well.

Read the whole story about Dr. Fallon here.

Radium Goods!

Readers often ask me if the radium cures in Doctor Olaf were "real" or "fiction." And the answer is, yes! Most of the radium products mentioned in the book are the names of actual products sold in the early half of the 20th century, and most of them did not, in fact, contain any radium. I suspect the same is true for the fabulous collection of radium products How to Be a Retronaut recently posted--everything from "Radium Brand Creamery Butter" to "Radium Lump Gloss Starch" (the "finest quality for laundry purpose").

See the entire collection here: ATOMIC BRAND NAMES.