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HEALTH ZONE - Pain Relief Introduction |
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Pain may be unpleasant but it is essential for survival. If cuts did not hurt, we might not cover our wounds. Walking with a broken leg would cause untold damage. All mammals feel and respond to pain in similar ways.
What is Pain?
Inflammation, disease, or a malfunctioning nervous system can all cause pain, but it may seemingly have no cause at all. The pain sensation can be described in many ways; throbbing, shooting, dull-ache, pounding, stabbing, wrenching, stinging, and cutting. It can cause crying and fainting. Special nerve cell receptors are involved in the detection of pain that determine whether it comes from a burn, cut or swelling. These receptors send signals to the brain, which interprets whether the signal constitutes pain.
Pain can be acute or chronic. Acute pain is usually severe and will be short in duration. Examples of what may cause acute pain are cuts, burns, fractures etc. Acute pain usually fades as the area affected heals, for example, if you cut yourself, it is likely that you will experience pain immediately afterwards, but as the cut heals, the pain will disappear. Chronic pain however, can range from being mild to severe and will last for longer periods of time. Chronic pain is usually described as such because the source of the pain cannot be removed, such as in people with chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis. Acute and chronic pain can take their toll both physically and emotionally.
Pain is a very individual experience and can only really be described by the person experiencing it.
What Causes Pain?
Consider what happens when you put your hands close to a fire. Your brain needs to know that they are in danger of being damaged and needs to take an appropriate action.
Specialised nerves in the skin called sensory neurones are the early warning system. They have proteins called receptors, which are activated by the heat of the fire. This in turn causes electrical impulses to be sent along the length of the nerve cell - which can be up to a metre long - to the spinal cord. The impulses activate yet more receptors on nearby spinal nerve cells. It is like a baton being passed between relay runners. The newly-activated neurones in the spinal cord then signal directly to parts of the brain that are involved in pain perception. And once the brain has interpreted the pain message - a somewhat mysterious process - appropriate action is taken to prevent further damage occurring; in this case, moving your hands away from the fire. Sensory nerves respond in a similar way to chemicals, pressure and all the other sources of pain.
As well as receiving the warning signs and initiating the required action, the spinal cord and brain send messages back to the sensory nerves to damp down pain. This is necessary when we need to tough it out and get on with things; childbirth for example. Failure to send these inhibitory messages is one cause of chronic pain - pain that continues after the injury is healed. Diseases such as arthritis that disrupt normal tissue function also cause chronic pain. Pain is generated too, by our nervous system generating spurious pain messages when there is actually no tissue injury. This is what happens in neuropathic pain. The most dramatic and mysterious example of neuropathic pain is "phantom limb syndrome" - where even though an arm or leg has been removed, the brain still gets pain messages from nerves that originally carried impulses from the missing limb.
How Can I Treat Pain and what Options are there for Pain Relief?
Pain is incredibly hard to treat because precise medical evaluation of pain and its causes is often difficult. Moreover, people have different pain thresholds, so the type and amount of medication needed differs. Use of over the counter painkillers such as aspirin, paracetamol and ibuprofen is increasing every year; but the uptake of alternative treatments such as acupuncture is also growing.
People have always searched for ways to relieve pain. In 6000 B.C., the ancient Sumerians were cultivating opium poppies and using them as analgesics. Morphine, the active pain-killing agent in poppies, was isolated in the early 1800s. We now know morphine works by tapping into a part of our own pain response system that normally damps down pain, so that we can continue to function. Without our natural versions of opium, called opioids, common painful situations such as childbirth or torn ligaments would be too intense. Through an understanding of how natural opioids work, medicinal chemists have made many opiates that are now widely used for the control of severe and chronic pain.
Another ancient mainstay of pain relief is a substance first discovered in willow trees. Around 400 B.C., the Greek physician Hippocrates prescribed willow leaves and bark for the treatment of pain and fever. At the end of the 19th century, a German chemist converted the active agent in willow bark into acetylsalicylic acid. This led to the birth of the aspirin which is still the most widely used human analgesic.
Present day pain relief has its limitations. The ideal analgesic should reduce pain levels rapidly and for many hours so that normal life can resume, but not dull pain so much that people unknowingly damage themselves. In addition, it should not cause physical dependency or unacceptable side-effects such as vomiting and drowsiness. Current non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and opioids fulfil some of these criteria but not all.
The most widely used analgesic for treating intense pain is morphine, but one big drawback to opiate drugs is that they are tremendously addictive.
In the early 1990s researchers testing a new anti-epileptic called gabapentin in animals, found it reduced pain. This began a series of clinical trials in neuropathic pain conditions. Gabapentin was approved in March 2000 for the treatment of neuropathic pain, although it is not known exactly how it accomplishes this action.
The use of electricity for the relief of pain goes back many thousands of years - the ancient Egyptians used electric fish. By the mid-1800s, physicians and dentists were beginning to use electrical stimulation as an analgesic. More recently, Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) has been tested in animal models of acute, inflammatory and neuropathic pain. Some medical trials have provided evidence for its efficacy in people. However, it is still not clear how the TENS machine, which delivers rapid electrical pulses to the skin, reduces pain.
If you experience any pain that causes you concern, you should seek professional advice from your doctor and discuss your options of treatment.
Living with Pain.
If you experience chronic pain then you are probably no stranger to the emotional and physical stress that it can cause. Pain can cause emotional conditions such as depression, anxiety and anger. Living with pain may be extremely frustrating as it may hinder you from doing the things that you would like to. However, the emotional stress of pain can in fact contribute to making the pain worse. It is important therefore, to do everything you can to reduce your chances of becoming stressed, anxious or depressed about your pain.
You should seek medical attention for any pain you experience and discuss your treatment options with your doctor. Talk to people close to you about what it is you are going through so that they can learn to understand your position and in turn, can offer you support.
How can I Help?
Pain, its causes and its treatments are all heavily researched. It is important for medical research to continue on pain so that a better or full understanding of its causes can be reached. Medical trials allow for new treatments and medications to be tested for their safety and effectiveness which is essential before making them readily available to the general public. Medical research is vital to the development of understanding of pain and its affects and can help researchers develop new treatments. By participating in a medical trial or medical research, you could be the key to the next treatment for pain. Medical research participants enable the knowledge of pain to move forwards and to constantly develop. Take a look through the BioTrax studies section to see if there is a medical research study that you can get involved with to help improve the quality of people's lives.
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 This information has been generously supplied to the BioTrax Volunteer Support Group by the :
Coalition for Medical Progress
Medical research studies may be conducted and are carefully designed to answer specific medical questions while protecting participants´ safety. Well conducted medical trials are the fastest and safest way to find improved treatments and preventions for diseases. Clinical trials or interventional trials determine whether experimental preventions, treatments, or new ways of using known therapies are safe and effective under controlled conditions. Observational or natural history studies examine health issues and disease development in groups of people or populations. For more information on current medical trials or to register on the BioTrax database, view the study section at www.biotrax.com .
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