College Station, Texas: After 12 years of clinical practice both in New York and Texas, Dr. Daniel Bettiol is hanging up his white coat forever to promote the healing benefits of proper body hydration.

Dr. Daniel Bettiol is leaving the profession of Chiropractic to pursue his clinically-tested belief that the primary causative factor in Headaches, Neck & Low Back pain is Dehydration of the tissues and the inability to eliminate accumulated Metabolic wastes from the body.

"Opioids are often ineffective for some types of pain at any dose. Pain intensity scores were unchanged postoperatively in patients receiving titrated opioid analgesia in accordance with Agency for Health Care Policy and Research guidelines when compared with a matched control group before guideline implementation. None of our patients with chronic nonmalignant pain receiving opioids according to protocol had complete relief of pain.

People with ruptured disks in their lower backs usually recover whether or not they have surgery, researchers are reporting. The study, a large trial, found that surgery appeared to relieve pain more quickly but that most people recovered eventually and that there was no harm in waiting.

And that, surgeons said, is likely to change medical practice.

The study, published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the only large and rigorous randomized trial to compare surgery with waiting for sciatica.

The study was controversial from the start, with many surgeons saying they knew that the operation worked and that it would be unethical for their patients to participate.

Nutrition important in the care of patients with chronic pain, and recommended they take essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids) and use olive oil in cooking.

Best avoided, are inflammation-inducing fats such as corn oil and margarine.

Some patients may benefit from switching from coffee to green tea, and avoidance of any food allergens such as wheat, corn, dairy products, and red meat.

Also recommended nonpharmacologic approaches for chronic pain such as cognitive therapy and mind-body approaches -- meditation and yoga -- as well as exercise and physical therapy.

August 2004 issue of Scientific American describes how pain of severe burns may be eased by the ultimate in high-tech distractions, virtual reality game.

Clinical studies are showing how effective virtual reality is at fighting burn pain. In an article in Scientific American, Hoffman described how they used a special virtual reality helmet that would work in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to confirm this. The team studied five regions of the brain that are known to be associated with pain processing. "We found that all five regions showed significant reductions, and the amount of reductions during VR, the amount of reductions in pain-related brain activity, ranged from 50 percent to 97 percent," says Hoffman. "The incoming pain signal is not even being processed during VR. There's much less pain being processed by the brain when the person's in VR."

After injury, pain sensors in the body can lapse into a hyper-excited state. Long after the original injury is gone, these pain cells keep on sending intense pain signals. Columbia University researchers report that an enzyme called protein kinase G or PKG is responsible for this long-term hyper-excitability of pain sensors. Rats studies show that turning PKG off stops the pain.

From the August issue of the journal Neuroscience.

Injections of human stem cells seem to directly repair some of the damage caused by spinal cord injury, according to research that helped partially paralyzed mice walk again.

"We set out to find whether these cells would be able to respond to the injury in an appropriate and beneficial way on their own," said Brian Cummings, first author of the paper.