I am such a huge cynic of this. This involves stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the antagonist, so to speak, of the sympathetic nervous s

I am such a huge cynic of this. This involves stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the antagonist, so to speak, of the sympathetic nervous system. A few years ago a company called Ardian had a minimally-invasive system called renal redervation for destroying the sympathetic nerves to the kidneys, in the hope that it would cure high blood pressure. Initial unblinded single armed trials were favourable, and so Ardian made $1,000,000,000 selling to Medtronic. Lo and behold, in the double-blinded randomised trial, renal denervation did absolutely nothing. Renal denervation was fuelled by optimism and bluff about the role for these nervous systems in disease. Shock horror, however, when manually altering them with a blunt tool such as ablation (in the case of renal denervation) or stimulation (the example here), doesn't actually help. The whole saga of renal denervation was one of the greatest examples of bad science and optimism getting ahead of us. This is a nice editorial: http://jamesphoward.com/papers/RDE.pdf http://jamesphoward.com/papers/RDE.pdf