Word: paines
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Physicians have since learned how to short-circuit that chain reaction. By numbing the surgical site with a separate injection of a local anesthetic, they can prevent many of the pain signals from ever reaching the spinal cord. Then, by administering small amounts of morphine to the spinal cord once the operation is over, they can significantly reduce any pain that occurs after the local anesthetic wears...
Basbaum's work proved that morphine not only relieves pain but prevents it from occurring in the first place. Building on his insights, other researchers determined that morphine and pre-emptive anesthesia given to patients undergoing abdominal surgery reduced their pain so effectively that they left the hospital, on average, more than a day ahead of schedule...
...addictive body chemistry, perhaps because they take the drugs in a social setting different from that of illicit users. "When addicts use drugs, they become less functional, more isolated, and they move away from the mainstream," says Dr. Richard Patt of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center of Houston. "When pain patients use drugs, they become more functional, much less isolated, and they move toward the mainstream." And when they no longer need the drugs, Patt says, they have, almost without exception, no difficulty gradually eliminating their intake...
...physician who nearly did lose her license is Dr. Katherine Hoover, formerly of Key West, Florida. In December 1993, Hoover got into trouble with Florida authorities because she had treated the chronic pain of seven of her 15,000 patients with narcotics. A pain specialist testified at her 1995 hearing that she was practicing within accepted guidelines. But the review board censured her anyway--a decision that was reversed on appeal. Says Hoover, who now practices in West Virginia: "There is a belief that anyone who prescribes narcotics is a bad doctor...
...field of medicine is the controversy more intense than in the treatment of children. Dr. Kathleen Foley, head of the pain service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City, remembers an adolescent who was terminally ill. "The father didn't want his son on morphine because he was afraid the boy would become an addict," Foley recalls. In his grief over the imminent loss of his son, it seems, the father failed to see the absurdity of worrying about long-term addiction in a child who is dying in pain...