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Researchers Are Developing Cure for Human Pain (neurosciencenews.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the that-didn't-hurt dept.

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.'"

12 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Too late for some. by AutodidactLabrat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Too late for some. by PvtVoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      I'm sorry you had to go through this, truly. It sounds like she needed to be given opiates much sooner than she was. There is no reason at all for anybody to go through that kind of suffering, except for the tooth-and-nails resistance of oncologists to get people into hospice before they start suffering like this.

      Anybody with aging parents or an ill family member needs to educate themselves about hospice, and advocate fiercely for their loved ones.

    2. Re:Too late for some. by Wycliffe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      I'm sorry you had to go through this, truly. It sounds like she needed to be given opiates much sooner than she was. There is no reason at all for anybody to go through that kind of suffering, except for the tooth-and-nails resistance of oncologists to get people into hospice before they start suffering like this.

      Anybody with aging parents or an ill family member needs to educate themselves about hospice, and advocate fiercely for their loved ones.

      I had a relative watch a friend die. They increased the drugs to the "maximum legal limit" and even tilted the bed to make it harder to breath so that the friend would die quicker. They then had to sit there and watch and keep hoping that each breath was their last. How is this and doing things like removing the feeding tube and letting someone starve to death "standard procedure"? It's cruel and unusual punishment. Even our criminals are treated better.

    3. Re:Too late for some. by bmo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >no reason at all ... except for the tooth-and-nails resistance of oncologists to get people into hospice

      It's not just that, it's a perverse Calvinistic view of chronic pain in general that one should just 'deal with it.'

      Never mind the fact that such pain has other clinical effects, like elevated blood pressure, depression, etc.

      The hostility that too many doctors have to analgesics is maddening. Over the past couple of years, it's gotten worse. Considering what's been going on with the latest moral panic over opioids/opiates and shenanigans like what's gone on over at the CDC about this, people are suffering and dying (sometimes because of suicide) needlessly.

      When the CDC gets piled on by a bunch of other agencies (FDA, HHS, etc.,) for fucking this up, something is rotten in Denmark.

      --
      BMO

    4. Re:Too late for some. by sg_oneill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The legal limit is "dont kill the patient". Unfortunately the realities of terminal illness is that people can be in such harrowing agony the only rational thing to do is to help the patient pass away so doctors will often quietly administer a dose that will probably kill the patient reasoning that its the only dose that will contain the suffering and if the patient dies, well such is terminal illness.

      This puts doctors in a horrible situation legally. We accept without question that it is humane to euthenise pets whos suffering is more than they can deal with. Yet we cant allow our own species to take a dignified exit when they, and the doctor, agree that hope is lost.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    5. Re:Too late for some. by Wycliffe · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A good suicide method would be to give a reasonable dose, then let the patient self-administer in 1mg doses. Someone tolerant enough of it to keep dosing themselves deserves the right to keep administering, if they so choose.

      That might work for someone who has a fully functional brain and is capable of movement but many times for the terminally ill at the very end, that's not the case. They might be brain dead, paralysed, non-responsive, mentally incompetent or one or more other reasons that they can't self-administer. Most people who would be aware enough and physically able enough to self-administer wouldn't actually want to commit suicide. I think the more common case are the people who can't self-administer or even express their wishes who are left to suffer.

  2. You may like to read: by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.
  3. Re:Cure for symptoms by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, you want to have the pain until you have pinpointed the problem. Then you can turn off the alarm.

    So yes, people need to be very careful about using a "cure" for pain. People who don't feel pain can end up with much more serious damage to themselves from otherwise mundane causes than people who do feel pain.

    Ever burn yourself on a stove and yank your hand back? Someone who doesn't feel pain would probably not notice until they figured out that the burning smell was their own charred flesh.

  4. Re:"Just a Flesh Wound" by davester666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem is, pain is remarkably important to humans. It tells us we are too close to the fire, or our finger is broken, or someone has just plunged a knife in our back.

    Sure, there are some people who are constantly in pain that this could held with, and you want some pain relief while you are healing, but even when healing, you don't want the possibility of pain gone [ie, broken arm, you get up to go to the washroom and stub your foot, breaking your toe, you want to find out right then it's broken, not later when doctor tells you to just live with it like that.

    --
    Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  5. Re:The world is crying out for better pain killers by sjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If your choice was confinement to bed or opiates, I'll bet you would sooner of later risk the opiates if that was an option. Pain can get severe enough to blot out thought even in the absence of a terminal condition. The answer used to be risk the opiates and give them years of more of less normalcy. The answer now seems to be let 'em scream.

  6. Re:"Just a Flesh Wound" by fredgiblet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes...and? They're not proposing permanent treatments I don't think, just providing relief for people with unendingly painful conditions. And even if they are there's people who would certainly want to give up pain. I know someone who's largely non-functional because of chronic pain due to nerve damage. Her quality of life is terrible because of that, I'm sure it's worth the risk to her to be able to actually use both of her arms.

  7. Re:The world is crying out for better pain killers by bmo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > the relatively harmless stuff like NSAIDs

    Speaking as a victim of this meme, I have to say that this is one of the most dangerous memes out there.

    Ibuprofen, and such, kill your kidneys. I should know, my cardiologist tore me a new asshole when I told him how much OTC ibuprofen I was taking for my arm pain. I am sure that part of the kidney damage I have is because of that.

    4mg of hydromorphone would have been /much/ safer. And no, I wouldn't have gotten addicted, because I'm not the type of person who does so, because I've seen other people with addiction problems and I've learned the easy way by watching them learn the hard way.

    It's too bad I had to learn about NSAIDs the hard way myself.

    >they will spin out of control if a person is on them too long.

    Chronic pain sufferers aren't looking to get high. They just want to get out of the fetal position and get out of bed.

    My wife has one of those rare doctors who is actually knowledgeable about chronic pain. She is terrified of what will happen to her when he retires - she travels an hour across the state because in 7 years, she's yet to find a doctor locally who takes chronic pain seriously. And this moral panic is terrifying her even more, on top of that.

    If she is cut off from her legal and safe meds, which she has been responsively using for decades now, she will either kill herself (the plan is a helium 'exit bag' - we have soberly discussed this at length, and I am not OK with it.) /or/ she will turn to street heroin, truly a sub-optimal solution. This moral panic is killing people and making heroin addicts out of chronic pain sufferers because they turn to heroin when cold-turkeyed and locked out by ignorant-as-fuck doctors from legal and safe opiates and get thrown into the world of "I don't know how much this dose is because I got it from Shady-Joe."

    This moral panic is a pogrom against the ill. It needs to fucking stop right now.

    And yes, there are moneyed interests behind this moral panic. You can google this stuff yourself.

    Kurt Cobain is dead largely because of chronic pain and the cascade of effects it has. Chronic pain is not to be fucked with.

    In his journals, Kurt often mentioned that he was suffering from chronic stomach pain. He went to several doctors but they were unable to determine the cause. His condition worsened as time progressed which prompted Cobain to shoot up more and more heroin to alleviate the pain. In his suicide note, Kurt references his stomach problems:

    "Thank you all from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach for your letters and concern during the past years."

    https://www.upvenue.com/articl...

    This war on drugs has been a fucking disaster.

    --
    BMO