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Who hasn't heard the saying, the only way to heal from pain is through it. Now a new study is saying that it's the way to recover from failure , too. According to newswise.com, our emotional responses to mistakes can lead to improvement. Feeling the pain of failure leads to more effort to correct your mistake than simply thinking about what went wrong, the study says. Researchers found that people who just thought about a failure tended to make excuses for why they were unsuccessful and didn’t try harder when faced with a similar situation.  In contrast, people who focused on their emotions following a failure put forth more effort when they tried again.  “All the advice tells you not to dwell on your mistakes, to not feel bad,” says  Selin Malkoc , co-author of the study and professor of  marketing  at The Ohio State University’s  Fisher College of Business , at newswise.com.  “But we found the opposite. When faced with a failure, it ...

Who knew?  When you take Tylenol, you stop caring about other people. Well, not exactly.  But close.  But a new study has found that when you take acetaminophen, you don’t feel others’ pain as much. Turns out when we're seeking relief from pain, we may also be decreasing our empathy for both the physical and social aches that other people experience, according to newswise.com.  Researchers at The Ohio State University found, for example, that when participants who took acetaminophen learned about the misfortunes of others, they thought these individuals experienced less pain and suffering,when compared to those who took no painkiller. “These findings suggest other people’s pain doesn’t seem as big of a deal to you when you’ve taken acetaminophen,” says Dominik Mischkowski, co-author of the study and a former Ph.D. student at Ohio State, now at the National Institutes of Health.  “Acetaminophen can reduce empathy as well as serve as a paink...

I remember it well.  A week before Christmas, an ice storm.  And a fall out running that broke my wrist. Now a new study says that patients with immediate medical needs tend to perceive doctors as emotionless. Mine was really a funny story.  I hit a bus on my way to the ER (it pulled out in front of me).  I was in such pain I just kept going. But sitting in the exam room, waiting for the doctor, two cops walked in to tell me I was being investigated for hitting a bus.  It turned out to be minor -- we had clicked mirrors, no damage -- but that added to the enjoyment of the day. Anyway, since I was at an immediate care center that didn't offer surgery (if needed) or high-caliber pain-killers, I was told to drive myself to the local hospital, that did.  Back in the car I went, only to arrive there to wait 13 hours to have my wristbone yanked three times to try to put it back in place. Oh my God. So I'm not sure it mattered too much whether my doc ...

We all know men are babies when it comes to pain (sorry, guys!).  But there may be a reason for it. A new study has revealed that the pain "circuitry" of men and women is different.  According to newswise.com, new research released today reveals for the first time that pain is processed in male and female mice using different cells. "Research has demonstrated that men and women have different sensitivity to pain and that more women suffer from chronic pain than men, but the assumption has always been that the wiring of how pain is processed is the same in both sexes,” says co-senior author Jeffrey Mogil, Ph.D., E.P. Taylor professor of pain studies at McGill University and director of the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain. I've been through major cancer surgery, many surgical biopsies, a c-section, eight stitches from falling and cutting my eye while running, and now am dealing with a kidney stone.  My husband, who had laser knee surgery years ago (...

What if you could tell when your child was really in pain? I’m not talking to fake not going to school or having to do a report or to apologize for not cleaning his room. We’re talking real pain .   As a mother (and even a father) you can probably tell when your child is hurting.   But doctors can’t.   So now, according to a new study, they’ve developed software that can, just from their facial expressions. Sound a little Hunger Gameish?   It isn’t. It's being used not only to help with alleviating it, but also in recovery. Researchers used the software to analyze pain-related facial expressions from video taken of 50 youths, ages five to 18 years old, who had undergone laparoscopic appendectomies at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, according to newswise.com. Based on the analysis, along with clinical data input by the study team, the software provided pain level scores for each participant. Studies have shown that under-treatmen...

We've all been there.  The nurse coming toward us with the needle, or, as in my recent ase, the resident saying "This won't hurt" as he yanks the broken bone in your wrist to try to put it back in place. Why do these people say this, and why does it hurt so much more when they say it? A new study has found that when this happens -- your expectations violated, and not in a good way -- it's because our expectations of pain affect the experience of pain, according to Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist and first author of the study, at newswise.com. “This effect shows us how important it is to manage people’s expectations when it comes to pain," he says. Duh.   Previous studies have shown that the expectation of intense pain can make pain feel worse while the expectation of milder pain can actually make it hurt less. It all has something to do with areas of the brain but all I know is, I don't...

What an incredibly sad thing.  A new study has found that a sample of mostly white American children from ages seven to 10 believe  that black children feel less pain than white children. Our research shows that a potentially very harmful bias in adults emerges during middle childhood, and appears to develop across childhood,” said the study’s lead investigator, Rebecca Dore, a Ph.D. candidate in developmental psychology at U.Va., at newswise.com. Dore noted that this finding is important "because many kinds of explicit biases emerge in early childhood – such as children wanting to play with friends of their own race – but those types of biases often decline in later childhood." But, she points out, the racial bias in children’s perceptions of others’ pain appears to strengthen from early to late childhood. The researchers found no evidence of a racial bias among their study participants at the age of five, but the bias began showing up among participants at the age o...

It happened to me coming out of anesthesia.  After I had my son by c-section and then another minor surgery, I awoke to the most infernal itching on my face.  I scratched and rubbed until my face swelled and my doctor asked if I had fallen! Chronic itching, which, of course, is not really what I had (it went away after about one miserable hour), which can occur in many medical conditions, from eczema and psoriasis to kidney failure and liver disease, is different from the fleeting urge to scratch a mosquito bite, according to newswise.com. "That’s because chronic itching appears to incorporate more than just the nerve cells, or neurons, that normally transmit itch signals," the Web site reports. Researchers found that in chronic itching, neurons that send itch signals "also co-opt pain neurons to intensify the itch sensation. Apparently, itching isn't so different from chronic pain, even in mice. “In normal itching, there’s a fixed pathway that transmits the ...

Codeine .  It's in our cough medicine.  We take it when we're in pain.  It's been around since forever.  But what if it made you feel worse ? "Using large and frequent doses of the pain-killer codeine may actually produce heightened sensitivity to pain, without the same level of relief offered by morphine, according to new research from the University of Adelaide ," as reported by newswise.com. The Web site quotes the University's Professor Paul Rolan , a headache specialist at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, who says codeine has been widely used as a pain reliever for more than 100 years, "but its effectiveness has not been tested" in this way before. "In the clinical setting, patients have complained that their headaches became worse after using regular codeine, not better," Professor Rolan tells newswise.com. "Codeine use is not controlled in the same way as morphine, and as it is the most widely used strong pain reliever ...

It's a weird thing but a new study has found that partners of people in pain often sleep badly when their partners are in pain. It's not because their partners toss and turn trying to get comfortable. T he partners were most likely just reacting empathically to their loved one's pain (bet we're talking women, here). The ones in pain sleep fine. My husband has been haunted by knee problems for most of his adult life.  A competitive tennis player from way back, his knee was injured in a match and, against better advice, he had his meniscal tear operated on -- and it was never the same again.  I can't say that I don't sleep well when he's in pain, but I do worry about him and wish he could have more healing. The study found that t he effects the patients' pain had on spousal sleep "were not a result of their own disturbances in sleep," the researchers said,according to medicalnewstoday.com. In other words, you're lying wide awake wh...

I have a doctor I really like.  But she's never around.  She only works three days a week and they're never the days I need a prescription filled or a question answered.  I have to call her office a couple of times to get a prescription renewed.  My last one waited five days before she refilled it, and I ran out. So, should I fire her?  That's a question Kristen Gerencher asks in her WSJ article on the subject.  She writes, "If you're frustrated with communication problems, a disorganized staff or a doctor's poor bedside manner, a change may keep your health—and health costs—from suffering." Gerencher gives as the main reasons patients switch doctors (which actually doesn't happen very often, due to the hassles): Unclear explanations Delays in getting test results Hard-to-resolve billing issues (my all-time favorite: the man charged for a hysterectomy) Rushed office visits  "Like in any relationship, sometimes the chemistry just i...

Not a surprise but a recent study has found that not only do women react differently to certain medications than men (and are in danger of overdosing on many common over-the-counter and prescription drugs), but we feel pain more, too. According to Tara Parker Pope, women in the study had pain levels 20% higher than men. Doctors put it down to women's hormones, organ size relative to men's, more fatty tissue and other causes that are feminine in nature and may cause medication to be absorbed, or not, differently than for men.  Since almost all studies have been based on men (hence, women not realizing they're having a heart attack when they feel nauseous and their jaw hurts vs. men's pain in the chest), there's still an awful lot we don't know about medicine, women, and pain. But here's the worst part. Laurie Edwards notes in the NYT Sunday Review that anesthesia can be a problem for women and even something as relatively benign as Ambien lingers in a w...