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It’s easy to dismiss many ancient practices of medicine and science – after all, we now know early practitioners of medicine got a lot wrong. But a series spearheaded by associate health and biomedicine editor Vivian Lam challenges this notion by looking specifically at medieval medicine across cultures and, as Vivian tells me, “how historical conceptualizations of medicine and health mutually shaped (and perhaps continue to shape) society then and now.”
Binghamton University historian Meg Leja brings us one of the first pieces on how much modern medicine owes to people in the Dark Ages who relied on herbal remedies, bloodletting and other practices that are totally at odds with today’s biomedical practices. But as Leja writes, “The major innovation of the age was the articulation of a medical philosophy that validated manipulating the physical world,” which was largely motivated by religious beliefs.
A recent paper finds that viewing chronic pain as originating in the brain, rather than the back or other parts of the body, could lead to better therapies. Researcher Yoni Ashar from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus describes his study, which found that pain reprocessing therapy was effective in “turning off” unnecessary pain signals in the brain. Ashar says a growing number of scientists now believe that chronic back pain is often caused primarily by brain changes, because the pain system gets “stuck” long after injuries have healed.
This past summer I had the delight of hiking in boreal forests in far northern Vermont, which were markedly different from woods I’ve tramped around elsewhere in New England. But these vital ecosystems appear to be shrinking, write a team of researchers. They delve into the latest research showing how a warming planet is influencing tree growth on the northern and southern edges of “one of the Earth’s last wildernesses.”
Also in this week’s science news:
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