Word: paines
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Look behind today's headlines about physician-assisted suicide and the right to die, and you'll find that what people are really talking about is the management of pain. Or rather, the mismanagement of pain. For the more neurologists learn about pain--what it is and how it is experienced--the more they are convinced that the key to pain relief is already at hand. Most kinds of severe pain, these scientists say, could be treated safely and effectively if doctors would only make more liberal use of narcotic drugs, particularly morphine...
...than most prescription-strength painkillers. No matter that the vast majority of patients today can take the drug without becoming addicted. Quite a few doctors, a large number of their patients and much of the health-care establishment want no part of it. Even specialists in the treatment of pain who prescribe narcotics on a regular basis refer to the drugs as "opiate medications," as if calling them by a different name would counter their shady reputation...
...advocating the use of narcotics to treat a stubbed toe. These powerful drugs are indicated only for the most severe, disabling pain. But research conducted over the past 20 years into the mechanisms by which the body experiences grievous pain suggests that certain narcotic drugs are so well suited to relieving suffering that it seems callous, maybe even negligent, not to use them...
Consider what happens inside your body when it is subjected to intense pain. Say, for example, you're on your way to work when a runaway car jumps the curb and crushes your left leg. First, your mangled limb lets loose a flood of chemicals, called prostaglandins, that trigger swelling and activate the nerves that stretch from leg to spine. As soon as the nerve signals reach the spinal column, another group of nerves takes over and passes the message on to the brain. It is only after the brain gets in on the act that you can "feel" your...
Scientists have long known that morphine blunts that chain of pain reactions by preventing the spinal nerves from signaling the brain. But what they didn't know until the late 1980s is that these nerves are more than just glorified gatekeepers. They actually "remember" the body's past travails, causing permanent changes that are recorded in their molecular structure. "Think of the spinal cord as a voice-mail system," says neurobiologist Allan Basbaum of the University of California, San Francisco. "A message comes in and leaves something behind." The longer the injury persists, the more sensitive the spinal nerves become...