About this ebook
This volume brings together leaders in neuroscience, psychiatry, and clinical neurology to examine how the brain shapes the experience of symptoms in neurological disease. Beyond the classic view that sham or inert treatments can produce real improvements in illness, it explores how expectation, perception, and context influence the expression of neurological conditions — including functional neurological symptoms, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, perceptual disturbances, chronic pain, and other symptom domains in which brain-based modulation is central.
By linking experimental research with everyday clinical practice, the book clarifies why certain symptoms persist despite appropriate care, why therapeutic responses vary across individuals and cultures, and how neural mechanisms of expectation and meaning shape the course of disease.
Providing clinicians, researchers, and trainees with a coherent framework for conditions in which brain-mediated modulation plays a defining role, this volume offers practical guidance for integrating emerging science into the evaluation and management of complex neurological presentations.
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About the author
Dr Blum’s research focuses on mechanisms of memory and cognition in aging, traumatic brain injury, and neurodegenerative disease. Her work has examined molecular and systems-level contributors to hippocampus-dependent long-term memory, as well as clinical factors affecting recovery after disorders of consciousness and post-traumatic amnesia.
Mark W. Green, MD, is Emeritus Director of the Center for Headache and Pain Medicine and Professor of Neurology, Anesthesiology, and Rehabilitation Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (USA), and is Emeritus President of the World Headache Society.
Dr Green has been a leading clinical voice in the field of headache and facial pain since 1978, contributing to the development of modern headache medicine and advancing care for patients with migraine and related disorders. Dr Green graduated from Case Western Reserve University (USA), and received his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (USA). He completed neurology training at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he directed the Montefiore Headache Unit. He later organized a section on headache and facial pain at Columbia University before joining Mount Sinai in 2009, where he served as Director of Headache Medicine and Clinical Professor of Neurology.
