NEW TREATMENTS FOR CHRONIC PAIN?

NEW TREATMENTS FOR CHRONIC PAIN? Gutwande says that medicine has been slow in making use of the new scientific view of perception. Gawande speculates that many medical conditions—unexplained back pain, experience of phantom limbs, fibromyalgia, tinnitus—arise from a breakdown or confusion in the body’s mechanisms for drawing inferences rather than from actual nerve or tissue damage. He draws support for this from some successes of “mirror therapies”, which try to reset the “sensors” which draw inferences. If his speculation proves correct for any class of conditions, then new therapies should be possible.