Behaviorally treated irritable bowel syndrome patients: a four-year follow-up

Nineteen of 27 patients suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) who had completed a multicomponent treatment involving progressive muscle relaxation, thermal biofeedback, cognitive therapy and IBS education were located and evaluated 4 yr posttreatment. Seventeen of 19 (89.5, or 63% of the total original sample) rated themselves as more than 50% improved. Six of the 12 patients (50%) who submitted symptom monitoring diaries met our criteria for clinical improvement, i.e. achieving at least a 50% reduction in primary IBS symptom scores. The means on all measures at long-term follow-up were lower than those obtained prior to treatment. When follow-up symptom means were compared with pretreatment means, significant (P less than 0.05) reductions were obtained on abdominal pain/tenderness, diarrhea, nausea, and flatulence.     

Freud, psychoanalysis and the psychosomatic problem

According to the author an unbroken hallucination of the pleasure principle is underlying the vision of mankind as in biotechnical medicine as well as in a concept of science that is reduced to technical progress. Psychosomatics is to overcome the false rationality of such thought.     

A learned change of response to inedible food in Aplysia

Aplysia fasciata attempt to bite and swallow food wrapped in a plastic net, tasting food through holes in the net. Net-enclosed food cannot be swallowed, and becomes cyclically lodged and pushed out of the buccal cavity. Aplysia gradually modify their response to this food, and eventually cease to respond. Twenty-four hours following training, memory is maintained, as shown by savings upon retraining. An essential component of the behavioral plasticity is food becoming stuck within the buccal cavity: when the lips are stimulated without allowing food to enter the buccal cavity, animals stop responding, but training takes longer, and memory is not retained. Savings upon retraining are contingent upon temporal pairing of food upon the lips and stimuli from within the buccal cavity: when lip stimuli and the experience of food stuck within the buccal cavity occur sequentially (rather than simultaneously), 24 hr later, animals are not significantly different from naive subjects.     

Relation between verbal recall and visual recognition of the same stimuli in young children

Five-year-old children (N = 112) were shown drawings of common objects three times either as a naming-and-learning task or as a preference task (incidental learning). A verbal recall test followed by a class- and item-recognition test, scaled to reflect the accuracy of item recognition, were given either 2 min or two weeks after presentation. Intentional learning with naming led to better immediate recall than incidental learning, but the recognition and delayed recall scores were equal for the two learning conditions. The probability of verbal recall of object names was in each case uncorrelated with the accuracy of visual recognition of the same objects by the same Ss. The results are closely similar to those obtained with adult Ss by Bahrick and Boucher (1968).     

O2 multistep method as a supplement to therapy of standard brain energy balance disorders]

The possibility of improving the brain's energy state by the O2 multistep method is discussed. An outline is given of several variations of the O2 multistep method, and this is followed by a discussion of the results of studies of the increase and decrease in concentration of high-energy phosphates in the brains of rats during and after the O2 multistep process. In conclusion, the author reports a twin series of tests where psychic irritations lasting for a short time only were triggered and in which such irritations were suppressed through using the O2 multistep procedure.