Pain Therapies

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http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/senses-and-perception/articles/2016/pain-therapies-102516/


This article focuses on a new way to relieve pain. The experimenters cite a rare mutation that can cause a person to feel no pain as a way to create a new kind of pain killer. The mutation causes a sodium channel to be inactive. This sodium channel, NaV1.7, is where pain signals begin. So, the experimenters devised a way to test the effects of a NaV1.7 blocker in people with EM which is a rare condition that causes a person to feel too much pain. The blocker worked but it blocked more sodium channels than intended. So the next step is to develop blockers for specific sodium channels.


I have experience working in areas where addiction is a serious problem. I wholly agree with the author when they say that, “Never has the need for new pain drugs been greater.” Addiction can ruin lives. We do need a less dangerous way to relieve serious and chronic pain. 

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 28, 2016 at 6:12 PM

    I didn't even know that there was a disorder in which people can feel MORE pain than normal. Now that I know, though, I'm glad to hear that researchers are working on a treatment for a disorder that must be debilitating.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownNovember 28, 2016 at 11:40 PM

    My personal way of treating pain is laughter. Weird, right?

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownNovember 29, 2016 at 12:34 AM

    My grandfather suffered severe physical pain for much of his later years and because he was in the medical field, he really struggled with the idea of using any sort of pain killers, worried about the addiction side of the medication. But more concerning once he began to require them was the side effects. He had to deal with so many other issues/side effects, especially as his dosages had to be increased. To create an alternative for people suffering from chronic pain without serious implications like addiction/side effects would be such a gain for the medical community and their patients.

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  4. UnknownNovember 29, 2016 at 8:34 AM

    This article summary offered a new way of approaching how to relieve pain and your commentary was helpful in applying the articles information to a real life problem. I agree that addiction to pain killers is a large, current issue, especially in the medical world. Post-surgery pain killers can be even more addictive for patients who are administered them to be taken over an extended period of time. From my experience with friends and family who were given pain killers post-surgery, when they were given a specific dosage and the medicine eventually ran out, they experienced withdraw symptoms similar to those of an addict. The study you found and read about could be a grand change in medicine and may positively influence patients in need of a more safe method of relieving pain, once they perfect the medicine's sodium channel blockers.

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