Word: analgesia
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...people realize, Wald said, that there are two different kinds of acupuncture procedures--acupuncture "therapy," the cure-all procedure practiced in China for thousands of years, and acupuncture "analgesia," a newly-developed technique for eliminating pain. Both procedures involve inserting and twirling needles in the skin, he said...
Stay the Knife. Technically, the total suppression of pain comes only with anesthesia, which cannot be prolonged. The lighter state of analgesia, or relief of pain without loss of consciousness, is far more difficult to achieve. For cancer patients with intractable pain of indisputably physical origin, neurosurgeons have devised a number of radical operations. One of the commonest, for pain anywhere below the neck, is cordotomy-literally, cutting the spinal cord-a remedy that is less drastic than it sounds. In the standard operation, the cord is exposed and a small cut is made in the nerve bundles controlling...
...with drugs originally designed to control epileptic seizures. For the relief of severe pain of virtually every kind, morphine and its synthetic analogues remain the most potent drugs known,* but all are highly addicting and need to be taken in stepped-up doses to maintain a constant level of analgesia. Supposedly nonaddicting substitutes are exultantly reported almost every year by research chemists, and are found just as regularly to be addicting in proportion to their effectiveness. Aspirin remains the most widely useful and, for most patients, the safest of analgesics, despite its limited potency...
...bring about this painless state, or analgesia, which involves the entire body,* Dr. Artusio puts patients through all the usual sequence of anesthetics (barbiturates, thiopental sodium, nitrous oxide, oxygen, ether) until they lose consciousness. Then he gives more oxygen and less ether, so that they edge back across the threshold into consciousness, and holds them at this level. Edna's case, filmed in color by E. R. Squibb & Sons for hospitals and professional groups, was typical of 120 mitral valve repairs on which Drs. Glenn and Artusio have worked-enough, they feel, to establish that ether analgesia is just...
...Pope also had a word for those who fear that analgesia in childbirth is inconsistent with the biblical "In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children." Painkilling in labor, said the Pontiff, is an honest, moral endeavor, "so long as no danger ... results for either mother or infant, and so long as the tender sentiments of parenthood are neither diminished nor destroyed...