Study: Acupuncture works directly on the brain to reduce the amount of pain we feel

Acupuncture works just perfect.

Here is just one simple example from my own practice:

It takes usually only 1 acupuncture treatment to ‘cure’ an acute tonsillitis (instead of ‘suppressing’ the infection with antibiotics), 3 treatments at the most.

A 100% success rate!

Sounds like a placebo doesn’t it?


Acupuncture’s effect ‘isn’t just psychological’


Acupuncture doesn’t just work as a placebo, MRI scans appear to show Photo: GETTY

It limits activity in parts of the brain tasked with gauging pain, an experiment on 18 volunteers found.

Crucially, researchers believe the study shows that acupuncture does not only work on a psychological level – as a ‘placebo’ – but that is also has a direct ‘dampening’ effect on the brain’s pain processing centres.

Many critics believe acupuncture only works as a placebo.

The experiment, conducted by researchers at the Department of Complementary and Integrative Medicine at University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, looked at brain scans of volunteers who were given mild electric shocks.

Firstly they were given the shocks without acupuncture, and then they were given the same shocks while acupuncture needles were placed between the toes, below the knee and near the thumb.

Researchers then compared MRI scan images – which can measure the small metabolic changes that take place in active parts of the brain – to see whether the responses differed.

Dr Nina Theysohn, who will present the research in Chicago on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, said: “Activation of brain areas involved in pain perception was significantly reduced or modulated under acupuncture.”

Read moreStudy: Acupuncture works directly on the brain to reduce the amount of pain we feel

Neuromarketing could make mind reading the ad-man’s ultimate tool

Neuroscience and marketing had a love child a few years back. Its name – big surprise – is neuromarketing, and the ugly little fellow is growing up. Corporate pitchmen have always wanted to get inside our skulls. The more accurately they can predict how we’ll react to stimuli in the marketplace, from prices to packages to adverts, the more money they can pull from our pockets and transfer to their employers’ coffers.

But picking the brains of consumers hasn’t been easy. Marketers have had to rely on indirect methods to read our thoughts and feelings. They’ve watched what we do in stores or tracked how purchases rise or fall in response to promotional campaigns or changes in pricing. And they’ve carried out endless surveys and focus groups, asking us what we buy and why.

The results have been mixed at best. People, for one thing, don’t always know what they’re thinking, and even when they do, they’re not always honest in reporting it. Traditional market research is fraught with bias and imprecision, which forces companies to fall back on hunches and rules of thumb.

But thanks to recent breakthroughs in brain science, companies can now actually see what goes on inside our minds when we shop. Teams of academic and corporate neuromarketers have begun to hook people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to map how their neurons respond to products and pitches.

Read moreNeuromarketing could make mind reading the ad-man’s ultimate tool