Study: Your Doctor Really Does Feel Your Pain
Brain Pain Regions of the brain associated with pain relief and reward were activated while doctors treated their patients. Courtesy Karin Jensen Revenge for "this will only hurt a little." They say good health is its own reward, but your good health may be a reward for your doctor, too. When doctors felt they were helping relieve a patient's pain, their brain activity mirrored that of a patient experiencing a placebo effect, according to a study published online yesterday in Molecular Psychiatry. A team of Harvard researchers tricked 18 physicians into thinking they were either relieving patients in pain or letting them suffer. This all took place within an fMRI scanner, where researcher could measure the doctors' brain activity. The participating doctors were told they were using an electronic device that relieved pain. To make this believable, researchers first gave the doctors a dose of thermal pain, then used the fake...