Summary of Norman Doidge's The Brain's Way of Healing

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Dr. Michael Moskowitz is a psychiatrist-turned-pain-specialist who has often been forced to use himself as a guinea pig. He and another psychiatrist-turned-pain-specialist, Bobby Hines, have set up a pain clinic in Sausalito, California, which treats West Coast patients with intractable pain.
#2 The brain can turn off pain because the function of acute pain is not to torment us but to alert us to danger. As long as Moskowitz didn’t move, he was in no danger, so his brain turned off his pain.
#3 The traditional scientific view of pain is that when we are hurt, our pain nerves send a one-way signal up to the brain, and the intensity of the pain is proportional to the seriousness of our injury.
#4 The brain controls how much pain we feel, according to the gate control theory of pain. The brain can close a gate and block the pain signal by releasing endorphins, the narcotics made by our bodies to quell pain.

Sujets

• Neurosciences
• Neuroscience
• Médecine
• Medical

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 15 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822599048
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Norman Doidge's The Brains Way of Healing
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Dr. Michael Moskowitz is a psychiatrist-turned-pain-specialist who has often been forced to use himself as a guinea pig. He and another psychiatrist-turned-pain-specialist, Bobby Hines, have set up a pain clinic in Sausalito, California, which treats West Coast patients with intractable pain.

#2

The brain can turn off pain because the function of acute pain is not to torment us but to alert us to danger. As long as Moskowitz didn’t move, he was in no danger, so his brain turned off his pain.

#3

The traditional scientific view of pain is that when we are hurt, our pain nerves send a one-way signal up to the brain, and the intensity of the pain is proportional to the seriousness of our injury.

#4

The brain controls how much pain we feel, according to the gate control theory of pain. The brain can close a gate and block the pain signal by releasing endorphins, the narcotics made by our bodies to quell pain.

#5

Moskowitz’s neck pain was caused by a water-skiing accident in 1994, which lasted for 13 years. It became chronic pain, and he began researching the brain’s role in pain. The idea that chronic pain was caused by a neuroplastic event of the brain was not accepted for another 25 years.

#6

The structure of neurons is explained. Neurons receive two types of signals: those that excite them and those that inhibit them. When a neuron receives enough excitatory signals, it will fire off its own signal. When it receives enough inhibitory signals, it becomes less likely to fire.

#7

The more often Moskowitz felt twinges of neck pain, the more his brain’s neurons recognized it, and the more intense it got. The name for this well-documented neuroplastic process is wind-up pain, because the more receptors in the pain system fire, the more sensitive they become.

#8

Moskowitz’s research showed that chronic pain is actually a learned condition. The body’s alarm system is stuck in the on position, because the person has been unable to remedy the cause of an acute pain, and the central nervous system has become damaged.

#9

The neuroplastician Michael Merzenich showed the competitive nature of plasticity by first mapping a monkey’s brain over time. He found that the areas that process sensations coming from each of the fingers in our right hand are processed in the touch area in our left hemisphere.

#10

Moskowitz’s inspiration was simple: he would use competitive plasticity in his favor. When his pain started, he would force those brain areas to process anything-but-pain, by flooding himself with vibration and touch sensations.

#11

Moskowitz knew that when a specific brain area is processing acute pain, only about 5 percent of the neurons in that area are dedicated to processing pain. In chronic pain, the constant firing and wiring lead to an increase so that 15 to 25 percent of the neurons in the area are now dedicated to pain processing.

#12

In her forties, registered nurse Jan Sandin was working with a 280-pound woman patient on a cardiac ward when the woman accidentally slashed her own leg and became hysterical. She couldn’t breathe, and she was forced to support the full weight of nearly three hundred pounds.

#13

The woman I saw before me, Jan, was sixty-two years old, beaming, perky, and off all medication. She had been free of all medication and pain for a year and a half, and life was returning to normal.

#14

The first MIRROR principle is motivation. The patient must become active, read about how pain develops, and take charge of their treatment. They must focus on the immediate reward of pain reduction rather than the long-term reward of changed brain function.

#15

The brain is not the enemy, and it will always seek a stable state. The problem is that at times, it stabilizes in a state of chronic pain. But if the brain is given a way to get back to its previous, pain-free state, it will not oppose the change.

#16

The body image is formed in the mind and is represented in the brain, then is unconsciously projected onto the body. It is independent of the physical body. When the body image doesn’t match the body, the difference is easy to detect.

#17

The experience of pain is not solely driven by sensory input from pain receptors, but is also influenced by the body image. When the brain determines that the pain is coming from a smaller area, it concludes that less damage has occurred.

#18

The sense of the body in pain is constantly being modified by visual input. Altering the visual imagery of the body can reduce pain. It is not clear why stretching the imaged fingers would reduce pain, but it may be because a stretched finger has different dimensions and appears slimmer.

#19

The placebo effect is when a patient with symptoms is given a dummy pill, such as a sugar pill, or injections with no active ingredients. The patient is told he is getting effective treatment, and surprisingly, he often gets immediate relief.

#20

The placebo effect can be seen in the brain, where it is believed that it can turn off pain by getting key areas to increase the production of endogenous opioids.

#21

The MIRROR approach and competitive plasticity are two methods that help patients eliminate their pain. They are not simply finding ways to relax their patients and lower their general level of arousal, as a skeptic might argue. The mind has the ability to target pain with laserlike precision.

#22

The neuroplastic technique allows patients to reduce the use of pain medication over time, once their networks have rewired. The effects last.

#23

The brain makes its own opioidlike substances to block pain, and the manufactured drugs supplement them by attaching to the brain’s own opioid receptors. As long as scientists believed that the brain couldn’t change, they never anticipated that bombarding the opioid receptors with opioid medications could do harm.

#24

Moskowitz has helped patients with a wide variety of chronic pain syndromes decrease their pain, including those with low-back pain from nerve injury and inflammatory damage, diabetic neuropathy, some cancer pain, abdominal pain, neck degeneration pain, amputation, trauma to the brain and spinal cord, pelvic floor pain, inflammatory bowel, irritable bowel, bladder pain, arthritis, lupus, and trigeminal neuralgia.

#25

The brain-body approach to chronic pain is a collaboration between Golden and Moskowitz. They have shown that patients can simultaneously neuroplastically influence their brains and their bodies to affect their pain.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

My walking companion, John Pepper, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease over two decades ago. He first started getting symptoms nearly fifty years ago. But unless you are a perceptive and well-trained observer, you would never know it. Pepper moves too quickly for a Parkinson’s patient.

#2

Pepper has taught hundreds of people with Parkinson’s to overcome their shuffling gait. He showed me how penguins have the same shuffling gait as patients with Parkinson’s.

#3

The glial-derived neurotrophic factor, which is made by glial cells, helps the brain grow. It is a brain growth factor that functions like a growth-promoting fertilizer.

#4

The neuroplastic brain evolved to learn in ambulatory beings who ranged around the world. As people become immobile, they see less, hear less, and process less new information, and their brains begin to atrophy.

#5

The Swedish Nobel laureate Arvid Carlsson, an extraordinary scientist and physician, discovered that dopamine was one of the brain chemicals used to send signals between neurons. He then discovered that about 80 percent of our brain’s dopamine is concentrated in the part of the brain that contains the substantia nigra, the basal ganglia.

#6

The lack of ideal clinical options for patients with Parkinson’s is why scientists are looking at non-drug ways to treat the disease. Deep brain stimulation is one such treatment, used for patients who don’t respond to medication.

#7

The neuroscientist Anthony Hannan, head of the Neural Plasticity Laboratory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, had done a series of experiments that would change our understanding of the role of the environment and exercise in altering the course of catastrophic neurodegenerative disorders.

#8

Pepper’s book, There Is Life After Being Diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, was a combination of personal memoir and self-help book for Parkinson’s. It explained how he had turned back the most dreaded symptoms through a specific form of exercise.

#9

John Pepper was born in London in 1934. His family was constantly on the run from the Nazis, and they never had enough food or clothes. When the Second World War began, the family began a life on the run, fleeing from house to house.

#10

John was a self-made success, but he was unable to sleep more than four hours a night for 18 years because of stress. He was driven, and he would go to bed at eleven p. m. and wake up at three a. to work.

#11

Until about a decade ago, physicians paid little attention to the prodrome symptoms. Parkinson’s usually strikes people in their fifties and sixties, but 5 percent can get it before they are forty.

#12

Pepper’s daughter, Diane, said that her father underwent a huge personality change in the late 1970s. He became angry about an ice cream that she wanted, and he would not let her have it.