Thursday 15 December 2011

Roger appears on The Health Show

This week Dr. Roger Newport will be appearing on The Health Show talking about our arthritis project. 

The Health Show is a new series that covers the latest advances in health related science and technology. This week they have a section on the MIRAGE technology and how we are using it to reduce pain in arthritis.

Roger demonstrating MIRAGE on The Health Show - BBC World 
Image provided by Rockhopper.tv.


During the Show Roger will be demonstrating the technology as well as explaining what our research is all about and why we think it works. Our original findings published in Rheumatology (available free online) showed a dramatic reduction of pain in 85% of a sample of osteoarthritis sufferers. Since then we obtained a grant from the Dunhill Medical Trust (ongoing) to continue with the research. 

The show will be aired on BBC World this Saturday at 10:10 and 20:10 GMT and again on Sunday at 07:10 and 23:10.

Not just arthritis: The MIRAGE was originally developed to investigate action and body representations of which pain is only one aspect (to learn more about how the MIRAGE was developed see our ongoing blog series - From Box Files to the British Science Festival). The MIRAGE allows us to create various weird and interesting bodily illusions that are not only fun, but can help tell us about how our brain represents and controls our body. You can find out about the different illusions we use from our quarterly illusion blog posts. The next (Winter) illusion - coming soon - will be the Disappearing Hand Trick, which was used for the latest MIRAGE publication (Current Biology) investigating body awareness.