How Does the Placebo Effect Work? Placebo analgesia might be all in the head, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. Read new article in The Scientist!
Featuring Wager et al., 2007 and Botvinik-Nezer et al., 2024.
How a ‘pain-o-meter’ could improve treatments
Pain is defined subjectively, but an objective measure of the experience promises to transform its management. Read new article in Nature!
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, several groups have identified patterns of brain activity that reflect different types of pain — including sensory, emotional and cognitive aspects of the experience. And some researchers have achieved similar results with electrophysiological recordings.
These efforts have yielded some of the most accurate pain-related signatures so far, offering insights into the neural pathways associated with pain and highlighting targets for therapeutic interventions. “This lays the groundwork for identifying potential treatment targets,” says Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
A next-gen pain drug shows promise, but chronic sufferers need more options
About 20 percent of adults in the United States suffer from chronic pain. Scientists hope new research translates into new options for relief. Read new article from ScienceNews here!
“The idea that your brain is actively creating pain, turning it up and down, facilitating spinal cord signaling of pain or dampening it, is really kind of a revelation over the past few decades,” says Wager, of Dartmouth. And it’s an idea that’s just beginning to percolate into mainstream medicine.
Hot sauce taste test reveals how expectations shape pleasure and pain
Tor featured in article from NewScientist: Brain scans of people tasting squirts of hot sauce have revealed how positive and negative expectations can influence brain activity patterns for pleasure and pain. Read here!
Tor Wager featured on CBC Radio’s The Current with Matt Galloway
Listen here! The chronic pain segment begins @ 47:00.
Many Canadians suffer from debilitating chronic back pain, affecting their work, relationships and even mental health. We hear from researchers about a treatment called pain reprocessing therapy, which could offer some sweet relief by re-framing that pain in our minds.
CBC Radio’s The Current is a meeting place of perspectives with a fresh take on issues that affect Canadians today.
Wall Street Journal: A New Way to Treat Back Pain
Read about the hope of pain reprocessing therapy to offer an alternative to drugs or surgery!
After an injury, brain circuits can become hypersensitive to prevent you from getting hurt again, says Tor Wager, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Dartmouth College and senior author of the 2022 JAMA Psychiatry study.
New therapy aims to cure back pain without drugs
More than 50 million Americans suffer from chronic back pain — but a new drug-free groundbreaking treatment, pain reprocessing therapy, is helping patients and offering new hope.
Check out the related publication!
Faculty Profile: Tor Wager and Breaking the Neural Code
Tor Wager, the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience, helps lead Dartmouth’s Breaking the Neural Code academic cluster, which includes research on how placebos affect patients who are feeling pain. “We study how the brain creates mental models, belief structures, that then guide how we experience the world, and in particular how we experience pain,” Wager says.