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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.'"
Pain is a warning that something is wrong and is harming you. You don't want the warning to go away... you want the problem that's causing the warning to be solved.
Heroin peddlers, illegal and legal alike, will shut this research down.
Actual heroin dealers are probably thrilled... less access to pills = more demand for powder, as our brilliant drug warriors recently proved by sending tens of thousands of people away from doctors and pharmacists and into the arms of heroin dealers. But better 1000 people suffer in agony than 1 person take his pills to feel good, amirite? The DEA controls how your pain is treated now, not your doctor. And their philosophy? "Not dying soon? Not screaming loud enough to give me a headache? No pain relief for you!"
As for the legal guys... pretty sure this will be something they can charge out the ass for that you'll have to take at least daily.
resinoferatoxin is considered ~1000x 'hotter' than pure capsaicin and is being developed for permanent pain relief uses in cases such as end-stage cancer.
It operates by causing the pain receptors to fire continuously until they die and you don't want to be awake for that, so sedation is required. Since it is targeted in nature, it may be applicable in the GP's wife's case where the issue is with specific nerves.
I stumbled across it a while back for unrelated reasons (I enjoy eating quite spicy foods and they love comparing it with peppers) it is being developed to provide relief for chronic pain.
Obviously any interested should check with their doctor, or the company developing this for options. I have no idea if it will work in any given situation or not, or when it might be available, and am not a doctor..
--- Mercutio was right.
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