Do you sleep like a baby or do you sleep like a dolphin? Baby’s sleep deeply with their muscles relaxed and their mind at ease. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? When was the last time you slept that way? Unfortunately, most of us sleep like dolphins, which is to say not completely asleep and not totally awake. Dolphins turn off half their brain and close one eye, allowing them to be partly asleep and partly awake at the same time. Stress from our day-to-day life can keep our muscles tense at night and our mind on “repetitive stress mode,” reliving the day’s events. That’s why I have a biofeedback therapist in my chiropractic clinic who teaches our patients how to breathe like a baby, and how to help relax both body and mind, so that they can sleep like a baby at night.
Archive for November, 2009
What’s in a dream? To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind. To Jung it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. To newer psychologists, dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations. To chiropractors, dreams simply mean that their patients are sleeping at night!
What if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all? Weird concept? Well, in a paper published in the October issue of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. Whoa! Physiological? Now, that’s right up a chiropractor’s philosophical alley!
Dr. Hobson believes that the brain is actually warming its circuits in anticipation of the sights and sounds and emotions of waking. “It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”
Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking (except, perhaps when we’re “daydreaming”? -admin).
“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis.
The paper has already stirred controversy and discussion among Freudians, therapists and other researchers, including neuroscientists.
For more on this story, go to: nytimes.com
If pain is “real,” why do placebos work sometimes? Good question! As a chiropractor, I treat a lot of people who are in a lot of pain. I have worked with people who were experiencing excruciating back pain and I’ve treated people who “should have” felt a lot of pain considering the condition of their spine, who weren’t. Pain tolerance differs greatly between people, and that is why I always ask my patients to pinpoint the level of pain they are feeling on a scale from 1 to 10. Could it be that pain may be “all in our heads.? A recent study appearing in the journal Science has revealed that the “placebo effect” goes right down to the spine, i.e., the spine is capable of regulating pain by dampening pain signals.
Through the use of fMRI, German researchers studied changes in spinal cord activity when individuals believed that they had been given an anesthetic rather than a placebo. They found that simply believing a pain treatment was effective actually dampened pain signaling in a region of their spinal cord, called the dorsal horn, suggesting a powerful biological mechanism was at work.
Traditionally, experts have viewed the effect of placebos as psychological, but the new research is the latest study to show evidence that there is an important physical component. The researchers found that the placebo effect is particularly strong when treating central nervous system conditions, like depression and pain.
For more on the researchers and their fascinating study, go to: reuters.com