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Sexual Addiction: Is It Real?

April 6th, 2010 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Research
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Tiger Woods, Jessie James, Michael Douglas, and Wilt Chamberlain (remember him?) are just a few of the celebs who admit to being plagued with “sexual addiction.” With rehab centers springing up all over, it would appear this condition is on the rise. But is there really a disorder called “sexual addiction,” or is it just bad behavior that finally gets caught? Is sexual addiction equivalent to alcohol dependency?

Experts who treat sexual addiction say it is a compulsive need to seek out and follow a certain type of sexual behavior. Acting out sexually is something the person does to avoid dealing with something else — a coping mechanism that is out of control. It is not really about sex — it is driven by shame.

OK, stop right there. Is it really an addiction? Does the person experience physical withdrawal symptoms if he isn’t watching porn or bedding new women? I can understand that some may have an unhealthy obsession with sex, but I’m getting sick of the “medicalization” of it all. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*

Can Magnets Disrupt Moral Judgment?

April 2nd, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, News, Research
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Research scientists at MIT have been studying the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) region of the brain that seems to be involved in judging the behavior of other people. With the help of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) applied to the region, they were able to affect the moral conclusions that people reached when analyzing the actions of others.

From MIT news office:

The researchers used a noninvasive technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to selectively interfere with brain activity in the right TPJ. A magnetic field applied to a small area of the skull creates weak electric currents that impede nearby brain cells’ ability to fire normally, but the effect is only temporary.

In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters’ actions on a scale of one (absolutely forbidden) to seven (absolutely permissible). Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

Understanding Why We Scratch An Itch

April 13th, 2009 by Medgadget in Better Health Network
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Although scratching has been everyone’s favorite method of removing an itch for thousands if not millions of years, scientists have not been able to uncover the neurological mechanism of this action. Now a team of University of Minnesota researchers used the long-tailed macaques as subjects in an experiment that showed that the nerves being scratched send different signals to the spinal cord and then to the brain depending on whether there’s an itch in the area. In addition to being a peculiar finding, this may lead to the development of stimulation devices that address acute itching, pain, or other nociceptive phenomena.

From the abstract in Nature Neuroscience:

Spinothalamic tract (STT) neurons respond to itch-producing agents and transmit pruritic information to the brain. We observed that scratching the cutaneous receptive field of primate STT neurons produced inhibition during histamine-evoked activity but not during spontaneous activity or activity evoked by a painful stimulus, suggesting that scratching inhibits the transmission of itch in the spinal cord in a state-dependent manner.

Abstract in Nature Neuroscience: Relief of itch by scratching: state-dependent inhibition of primate spinothalamic tract neurons

Image: joyrex

(hat tip: AP)

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget.com*