• Question: Is your research beneficial to the world of medicine?

    Asked by captainboftastic to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 18 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      @captainboftastic
      Hello!
      I think my work is beneficial to the world of medicine. People with psychosis need to be treated with drugs and often kept in hospital for a while, so finding out whether cannabis use is a cause of psychosis could potentially keep these people healthy and therefore not in hospital or having to take drugs.

      Hope this answers your question 🙂

    • Photo: Rachael Ward

      Rachael Ward answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      An important question!

      My work will hopefully help us understand more about how serotonin is controlled in the brain and this could be beneficial to medicine as, with more knowledge on this, we might be able to design better drugs to treat disorders that involve serotonin – such as depression. At the moment, we have drugs to treat depression but for many people, they just don’t work so this is an area of medicine that needs improving.

      Before that, my work was studying spinal cord and looking for a treatment to reduce paralysis that people suffer after spinal cord injury. We found a drug that could do this and my old lab are doing more experiments on it, hoping to give it to people sometime in the future. If it works, that would be very beneficial to medicine as we currently don’t have a good treatment for this.

    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi @captainboftastic

      I wouldn’t say the work I do really benefits medicine, but a project that I was part of was funded by the Medical Research Council, so I guess my work does relate to medicine. We are trying to find the best way to ‘train’ the brains of children who have difficulties learning to speak or read. Children with language difficulties including reading don’t normally go to their doctor for help, but they see people as school – may be an Educational Psychologist or a Speech and Language Therapist. These people are more interested in a child’s wellbeing at school rather than their general health. So I think my work is important for helping people like medicine, but it is not really the same as medicine.

      I hope that answered your question.

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      I would say the same as Tim. Personally, my work doesn’t relate to medicine, but a lot of linguistic scientists do work on Speech and Language Therapy and other fields like that. They need to know a lot of the same basic stuff as I need – about the structure of language and how to analyse it – but they do different things with it to what I do!

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