A group of British investigators headed by H. Walach has studied the psychological mechanisms of 'distant healing', a form of spiritual healing, in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.

409 patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) were randomized from 14 private practices for environmental medicine in Germany and Austria in a two by two factorial design to immediate versus deferred (waiting for 6 months) distant healing.

Half the patients were blinded and half knew their treatment allocation. Patients were treated for 6 months and allocated to groups of 3 healers from a pool of 462 healers in 21 European countries with different healing traditions.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, April 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Pinnacle PR, the world's largest specialist international PR training company, opened a Dubai office today to service strong regional demand for world-class public relations and communication skills.

Located in the prestigious Emirates Tower, Pinnacle Dubai will provide PR courses in English and Arabic. Popular topics include media interview training, crisis communications, corporate responsibility, communications strategy development and media relations.

Pinnacle co-founder Jennifer Hardie, who has worked extensively in the region, will oversee the office, which represents the latest phase in Pinnacle's international expansion. Pinnacle training serves more than 500 clients in 50 countries.

RALEIGH, North Carolina, April 16 /PRNewswire/ --

DARA BioSciences(TM) (Nasdaq: DARA) announced today that Surgi-Vision, Inc., a privately held company of which DARA Biosciences owns approximately 9.8% of the outstanding shares, has entered into a licensing and development agreement with Boston Scientific Corporation (NYSE: BSX) for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-safe technology.

Is fairness simply a ruse we adopt only when we see an advantage in it for ourselves? Many psychologists have moved away from this utilitarian view, dismissing it as too simplistic, but recent advances in both cognitive science and neuroscience now allow psychologists to approach this question in some different ways, and they are getting some intriguing results.

UCLA psychologist Golnaz Tabibnia, and colleagues Ajay Satpute and Matthew Lieberman, used a psychological test called the “ultimatum game" to explore fairness and self-interest in the laboratory. In this particular version of the test, Person A has a pot of money, say $23, which they can divide in any way they want with Person B. All Person B can do is look at the offer and accept or reject it; there is no negotiation. If Person B rejects the offer, neither of them gets any money.

LONDON, April 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Results of a study investigating an oral therapy for relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (MS) have shown that continuous use of the drug, known as FTY720 or fingolimod, led to two-thirds of participants remaining free of relapses over three years.

During the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Chicago on Wednesday, Italian researchers reported the results of the study of 173 people.

The results also showed that the inflammatory activity associated with MS, as assessed by MRI scans, remained low with 89 per cent of people with MS free of active brain lesions three years after starting the treatment.

True agoraphobia is an invalidating disease but a paper by Giovanni A. Fava and associates of the University of Bologna, published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, questions the excessive emphasis on panic which has been attributed in the past decade and the role of pharmaceutical industry in this attribution.

In studying the phenomenology of panic attacks, Argyle and Roth noticed that truly spontaneous attacks, not preceded by anxiety-provoking cognitions, were uncommon.

Patients meeting positive criteria for panic disorder suffered from the whole range of anxiety disorders, and a unique relationship with agoraphobia was not seen. Indeed, other diagnoses (particularly social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder) frequently predated the onset of panic. This was true also for agoraphobia.

HONG KONG, SAO PAULO, Brazil, SHANGHAI, China and PHILADELPHIA, April 16 /PRNewswire/ --

- Strategic Alliances with Roche and Pfizer Provide Portfolio of Over 20 Products -

moksha8, Inc. announced today strategic partnerships with Roche and Pfizer, the launch of over twenty products and establishment of its Latin America headquarters in Sao Paulo, Brazil. moksha8 is committed to providing the highest quality medicine to the fastest growing markets of the world, with an initial focus on Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

There is continual debate taking place over whether organisms are the result of intelligent design or evolution. The proponents of intelligent design believe that chance and selection are too casual and slow to allow complex new properties to arise. In particular, they argue that the intermediate steps in shuffling the genes to make something new are likely to scramble the existing system and be bad for the organism, e.g., "half an eye is bad for you."

A study directed by Mark Isalan, leader of the group Gene Network Engineering and Luis Serrano, coordinator of the research programme Systems Biology and leader of the group Design of Biological Systems from the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, says that although it may seem incredible that organisms could be able to face extreme mutation processes and gene reorganization, that is just what happens.

EXTON, Pennsylvania, April 16 /PRNewswire/ --

- Upon Marketing Authorization Orphan Status Would Provide for Ten Years of Market Exclusivity in the European Union for Both Investigational Treatments

Morphotek(R), Inc., a subsidiary of Eisai Corporation of North America, announced today that the European Commission has granted orphan drug status to the monoclonal antibodies - farletuzumab (also known as MORAb-003) for the treatment of ovarian cancer and MORAb-009 for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.