Research Proves Negative Thinking Can Make Pain Therapy Less Effective

posted on Mar 17 by Snow in the Disability News, Health, Healthcare, Opinion and Discussion category

New research by German and British medical researchers proves that negative thinking can make pain therapies less effective. The study was co-sponsored by the University Medical Center in Hamburg, Germany and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Researchers studied how patients respond to pain and how patient expectations can play into perceptions of pain.

During the study, published in the Feb 16 issue of the Science Translational Medicine journal, researchers scanned the brains of patients while administering different pain medications that resulted in various levels of relief from pain. The study found that positive and negative thinking can actually affect how the brain interprets pain and how well pain medications work on the patient.

According to the study, negative thinking can actually make pain medications less effective in what is known as the “nocebo effect.” Most people are familiar placebo effect that means that patients report results by positive thinking, even if the medicines they are taking aren’t effective. This new pain study shows that the nocebo effect is the opposite, meaning that negative thinking can make medications seem to be less effective at managing pain, even if they are proven to work.

Doctors all over the world are looking at this study to see how they can better administer pain drugs to their patients. “We all know that many treatments work for some people but not for others,” says neuroscientist, Dr. Randy Gollub of Massachusetts General Hospital to ABC affiliate KERO23 in response to the study.

“Doctors shouldn’t underestimate the significant influence that patients’ negative expectations can have on outcome,” Irene Tracey, of Oxford University’s Center for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, says in a news release, quoted by WebMD Health News. Many doctors like Gollub are realizing that they need to be paying more attention to their patients’ mental state during pain therapy.

Sources:

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/70/70ra14.abstract

http://www.rxlist.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=126069

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110301/ap_on_he_me/us_med_healthbeat_negative_thinking

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/41835397/ns/today-today_health/

http://www.turnto23.com/health/27027875/detail.html