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Researchers Are Developing Cure for Human Pain (neurosciencenews.com)
transporter_ii writes: Scientists from University College London seem to have come up with a two-pronged treatment regimen they believe would help patients suffering from chronic pain. And in a strange irony, they did it by making it possible for mice – and one human – to feel pain when they previously couldn't. From the story: "To examine if opioids were important for painlessness, the researchers gave naloxone, an opioid blocker, to mice lacking Nav1.7 and found that they became able to feel pain. They then gave naloxone to a 39-year-old woman with the rare mutation and she felt pain for the first time in her life. 'After a decade of rather disappointing drug trials, we now have confirmation that Nav1.7 really is a key element in human pain,' says senior author Professor John Wood (UCL Medicine). 'The secret ingredient turned out to be good old-fashioned opioid peptides, and we have now filed a patent for combining low dose opioids with Nav1.7 blockers. This should replicate the painlessness experienced by people with rare mutations, and we have already successfully tested this approach in unmodified mice.'"
Obligatory Monty Python Black Knight
let us have this.
Every medical doctor "scientist's" dream.
Heroin peddlers, illegal and legal alike, will shut this research down.
Scientists from University College London seem to have come up with a two-pronged treatment regiment
Two-pronged? Sounds painful. Couldn't they have made it one-pronged, or, like, two-nubbed or something?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Ever watch a Cancer patient die?
I have. I listened to her cry, and whimper, and finally scream until she had to be sedated into unconsciousness with morphine and I mean a LOT of it.
If this just DELAYS that final dosing, it would add weeks or months of enjoyable life to those who are dying of such agony.
Patented? GOOD! Maybe this time the patent rights will be granted to competing entities, allowing for some competition.
Since these are British researchers, we can so hope, they aren't quite as corrupted as our government funded research.
Editors? We don't need no stinking editors!
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
You may like to read:
Gunmen Kill 12, Wound 7 At French Magazine HQ
10 Confirmed Dead In Shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College
Jeez. If you're going to give me recommendations, could you at least not recommend stories that are two months to a year old?
Next up: Japanese Cities Destroyed by Nuclear Bombs
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This is going to upset all of the sadists and masochists out there.
On the other hand, I'm sure everyone in the militaries (every country) will have a lifetime prescription for this.
We've got a cure for pain, a cure for fever (aspirin, Ibuprofin), now all we need is a cure for tiredness.
Once we have that, doctors will have a prescription cocktail of 3 medicines that will cure almost anything!
(Your symptoms went away - what's the problem?)
Availability from your local physician with the inclusion to the covered treatments: no sooner that 2035, April, the first.
> we have now filed a patent for combining low dose opioids with Nav1.7 blockers
A patent! How super excellent. Now I'm sure these will never cost any more than $10,000 per dose.
The world will be so much better with yet another drug patent shooting the price of drugs into the sky where nobody can afford them.
The torturers will love this. Make people feel double the pain...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
(setting aside the pain issues related to chronic illness)
Personal injury such as laceration, infection, and burns are a common issue for people who don't know they're injured. Pain is how the body tells you something it wrong. It shouldn't be a switch to flip on and off because your boss wants you to work a double shift. Then accidents happen.
Cute for tiredness is only a schedule IV drug https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil
It's called alcohol. The more you drink the more your pain goes away.
My dad always told me that fish couldn't feel pain because they are cold blooded. I hated seeing the fish hook through their lip, or worse, down their throat. He'd rip the fish hook out of their throat causing them to bleed. I've even seen him filet a fish before it was fully dead (heart still beating, still flapping once and a while). I think if a fish can feel anything, like touch, then it can also feel pain. Years ago I saw an article about some scientists who tried putting a spicy hot paste on a fish's lips. The fish kept opening and closing it's mouth in a way that seemed like it was disturbed and possibly in pain.
Now that scientists know how pain works, I'd like to know if fish really do feel pain. Get on it!
Soldiers not feeling pain... is that the future?
in just the US. It is a major symptom that goes along mostly with about 120 million people with chronic illness. About half the adults in the US have a chronic illness.
Painkillers (NSAIDs & Aspirin) can often cause other problems, like gastrointestinal bleeding. Hence, if a new regime to control pain actually works, it might solve a number of issues in treatment of chronic illness. But it is not going to eliminate the chronic illness. In other words, stay healthy.
That's why this story is so cool.
There's a good reason why doctors are hostile to analgesics. They can cause damage that lasts far longer than the acute pain, and can cause effects in the long term that are worse than the chronic pain, in many cases.
For many cases of chronic pain, the relatively harmless stuff like NSAIDs, aspirin, and acetaminophen don't really work well enough, and in high doses all of these are toxic. So out come the opiates, however, opiates quickly induce tolerance so larger and larger doses are required. And the tolerance becomes addiction, and the brain starts getting re-wired. Not to mention the side effects of opiates, which aren't all that nice either.
It can take *years* for a brain re-wired by long term use of opiates can return to "sort of" normal, if ever. And the return to normal has nasty psychological effects, such as depression, OCD-like symptoms, suicidal tendencies, and an inability to be happy or experience joy.
It's much more than "moral panic" over opiates. The drugs are frankly dangerous, and even with the very best management practices, they will spin out of control if a person is on them too long.
I'd only want to be on large amounts of opiates if I were terminally ill.
Nothing that involves the administration of any amount of opioid peptides (and this does) will EVER replace NSAIDS in the United States.
If I understood the paper, what they've found is essentially a way to make anybody's body react to opioids as if they had less than zero tolerance ... so that very small doses can deliver very large effects.
Medically that's awesome, but the DEA isn't going to see it as anything other increasing the potential for opioid abuse. IF they approve its use at all, they will regulate it like it's the strongest opioid on the books.
I remember them well.
You are welcome on my lawn.
quote: "They then gave naloxone to a 39-year-old woman with the rare mutation and she felt pain for the first time in her life."
What a heartwarming story!
Woman breaks her toe on a table leg. "AAAAH! Ngh. . . It's so. . . wonderful! Gaaah!" Cries tears of joy(?).
OK, I understand that this is a serious medical condition, not to mention a breakthrough in our understanding of the subject. No disrespect. . . But I couldn't help noticing the irony and dark humor implicit in that one sentence.
world pain?
Good Scotch => Less Pain
My introduction to hypnosis was having three teeth pulled after a five minute session. No drugs. One tooth had three roots wrapped around bone. For a week I spit out bits of broken bone, but no pain, no bleeding at any time.
A skilled hypnotist can remove chronic pain in a single session. Even better, he/she can teach how you can do it yourself, if necessary for the rest of your life. Most people do well with hypnosis.
There seems to be a lot of superstition and mystery concerning hypnosis among the ignorant, especially in the medical profession. It can't do all miracles but it does some very well. If you haven't looked closely in to it you are doing yourself and your loved ones a disservice. You'll never know the myriad ways it can benefit you.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I'd post the whole zalgo thing if the site supported Unicode.
Are you fucking serious. Causing more pain?! I've experienced plenty, to the point where I come back around to my original decision about a decade and a half ago that suicide is preferable to the pain of circumcision, at least what happened to me. I gather circumcisions generally go well. I'm just unlucky.
(I am about to lose access to my meds, and "religious objection!" may prevent me from getting a replacement, as much as I want to cooperate with the system. How does one cooperate with a system that is designed to kill you by excruciating pain instead of the natural way? I will try.)
Except, this time, I have these words of advice:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
So here's how it is, Slashdot and Soylent. I went off on Soylent, but I guess I'm feeling green today. Dox me, geek feminism wiki. Call me a rapist. Blame me for the lack of female programmers. Just do it. Insert relevant image macro.
Interesting..
What about that?
If you can kill, or at least scale back the pain that active, epic levels of idiocy cause me, I'd wholly fund the thing tomorrow.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I believe this "cure" for pain will fail, though it may be a more effective treatment than traditional opiates if it has fewer side effects. Why will it fail? Pain consists of TWO key elements. Element 1 is the physical stimulus or nerve conduction (this is actually the least important). Element 2 is the brain's emotional response to the stimuli it received. The brain is capable is experiencing pain even when no stimulus is received from a peripheral site. Phantom limb pain in amputees definitively proves this. The brain has a "map" of the body and is capable of experiencing pain even when a body part no longer exists. Therefore, anything that blocks nerve conduction (like a sodium channel blocker) will not stop pain in all patients. I'm not trying to say this new drug target will be useless; it might be fantastic, but it will not "cure" pain by any stretch of the imagination. I'm interested to see what kind of side effects are experienced when nav1.7 is blocked in HEALTHY patients.
The hostility that too many doctors have to analgesics is maddening.
It's not that the doctors are hostile to giving adequate doses of painkillers.
It's that the DEA examines how often and how much they prescribe, and if it is too high (by their far too low scales) they come down on the doctors with penalties that are often career-ending. This puts doctors treating chronic-pain cases, or painful diseases, at substantial risk. So they underprescribe painkillers in order to avoid discovering the current administrative threshold by exceeding it.
This is particularly appalling now that it has been discovered that adequate opioid painkiller dosage in the first weeks following a traumatic injury apparently prevents post traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps the high and rising incidence of this debilitating condition in the past decades was entirely the result of the drug war.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Discovery of a selective NaV1.7 inhibitor from centipede venom with analgesic efficacy exceeding morphine in rodent pain models http://www.pnas.org/content/11...
The substance in question is , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I had tried alcohol and decided that I don't like it so I don't drink it at all. I used prescription opiates and I haven't got addicted to them. A half-finished bottle of oxycodone still stands on my shelf, I'll throw it away once it expires.
He has a fantastic bit about his mother's passing. He's not everyone's cup of tea, but this one is worth a listen.
Damn KG, your story mirrors mine almost exactly. I worked for EMC in the government sector. I was a solutions architect building out storage systems for the government. I used to snort the fentynol gel when I could get my hands on it. I started out with 40mg/day of OxyContin. Quickly rose to 240mg/day. That warm feeling just made me feel complete. It made me feel invincible, and the skies were the limit. It helped me ignore the stupid shit going on around me. Then addiction kicked in. I switched to snorting H to shooting H. I started heroin because the pills were to expensive and H was much cheaper(also more dangerous).
I have been clean for 5 years now. Only drugs I use are my suboxone and marijuana. I can't believe you still have to take that much suboxone. I started with 16mg doses, dropped to 8mg doses, Now I am now down to 1mg a day. Sometimes I only take .5mg a day.
On bad days if I get an urge, I'll take 4-6mg of suboxone and feel that warm feeling you referred to. Because I take such a low dose daily, the high doses now effect me more.
I was also told that suboxone had a ceiling limit. After 8mg it hits a ceiling. The rest of the drug just never gets activated because it fills up all your receptors.
I have been following you on /. for years now. I would love to correspond with you. Shoot me an email @ mawhite1983 (at) gmail.com. I would love to pick your brain and chat with you on various subjects. Sorry I am ac, I had an account back in 1999 but got addicted to drugs around 2001. That is when computers became secondary. Don't remember the email or password I used. I am a long time reader of /..
I'm very glad this discovery is coming along, and hope it gets out on the market quickly (and at a reasonable price).
I had the personal experience of knowing an individual who could feel pain well enough .. but couldn't identify from the pain where the injury was! He happened to be a Montagnard, Nott, the M-79 gunner on my recon team in Vietnam (long long ago) .. but I suppose that's neither here nor there. I saw him get injured several times and it was always the same thing. It usually took a couple of seconds; his expression would show pain and discomfort; and he'd start checking out his body to see what was hurt. Usually he couldn't pin it down until he found the bleeding part (first time I saw it), or found a joint wasn't working properly or would generate higher pain levels when used.
He lived with it just fine, but I found it curious to say the least.
Email has been sent. (From email address associated with my profile.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"They then gave naloxone to a 39-year-old woman with the rare mutation and she felt pain for the first time in her life."
After 39 years she finally got to 'enjoy' anal sex.