Word: paines
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...medical costs result from harmful reactions to drugs. But relief is on the way. All too aware of the toll on the nation's health and pocketbook, medical researchers are devising a host of safer and more effective drug-delivery systems, many of them also designed to overcome the pain and inconvenience of traditional remedies. They range from such low-tech items as anal suppositories to innerspace-age microcraft reminiscent of the tiny ship that carried Raquel Welch through a patient's blood vessels in the movie Fantastic Voyage...
...hypodermic needle, fear of which causes many diabetics, for example, to delay necessary injections of insulin. One such device is the Mosquito, a small disk equipped with a tiny needle that penetrates only seven micrometers into the skin--not deep enough to impinge on nerve endings and cause pain. Attached to a patient's side, the disk allows mobility while it delivers the prescribed dose of drug evenly over a 24-hour period...
...early 1990s, John Daly, a biochemist at the National Institutes of Health, discovered that an extract from the skin of a tiny Ecuadorian tree frog was a potent pain killer, some 200 times more effective than morphine--at least in rats. The extract, known as epibatidine, is structurally and functionally similar to nicotine. It seems to prevent the nervous system from processing pain signals by interfering with nicotinic receptors in the brain...
...several hundred related compounds they had synthesized as experimental treatments for Alzheimer's disease. One of them, ABT-594, turned out to be remarkably similar but much less toxic. Tests on animals indicate that ABT-594 is about 50 times better than morphine in relieving both chronic and acute pain yet seems to be nonaddictive. Phase II tests on humans should be completed by the end of the year...
Unfortunately, says Dr. Kathleen Foley, an attending neurologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, not all pain can be controlled. "But you know what?" she says. "We'll never do anything if we don't try." And no one can even begin to help you until you say where and how much it hurts...