Brain processing of acupuncture stimuli in chronic neuropathic pain patients may underlie its beneficial effects. We used fMRI to evaluate verum and sham acupuncture stimulation at acupoint LI-4 in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) patients and healthy controls (HC). CTS patients were retested after 5 weeks of acupuncture therapy. Thus, we investigated both the short-term brain response to acupunctu...

Most of the analgesic clinical trials have failed to succeed over the past years because of the occurrence of large placebo responses. Patients' expectations about the therapeutic benefit represent a major determinant of the placebo response. Therefore, assessing patients' expectations should become the rule in any clinical trial. This would allow us to better interpret therapeutic outcomes whe...

Species may benefit from green infrastructure, i.e. the network of natural and anthropogenic habitat remnants in human-dominated landscapes, if it helps isolated populations remaining patches to be functionally connected. The importance infrastructure is therefore increasingly emphasized conservation policy counter biodiversity loss. However, there limited evidence, particularly plants, that pr...

Randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials are recommended for evaluation of a treatment's efficacy with the goal of separating the specific effects (verum) from the non-specific ones (placebo). In order to be able to carry out placebo-controlled acupuncture trials, minimal/sham acupuncture procedures and a sham acupuncture needle has been used with the intention of being inert. However, cl...

The aim of this review is to provide an overview of the different effects of manual and electroacupuncture on the central nervous system in studies with different neuroimaging interventions. The Database PubMed was searched from 1/1/2000 to 1/6/2014 with restriction to human studies in English language. Data collection for functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) studies was restricted to the perio...

In the present study, the immune-modulating efficacy of a polyphenol-rich beverage on symptoms associated with the common cold was evaluated. For this purpose, ninety-eight patients reporting common cold symptoms that began no longer than 24 h before the study intervention were randomly assigned to consume either the test beverage or placebo twice per d for 10 d. The severity of the disease was...

The genus Galium (Rubiaceae), comprised of approximately 1300 species and used for the treatment of a variety of pathological conditions in folk medicine of many cultures. In this study, antioxidant activities of aerial parts of G. verum were investigated employing various in vitro assay systems, i.e. DPPH and nitric oxide radical scavenging, reducing power and H2O2 scavenging. IC50 for DPPH ra...