Word: spinal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...crying or moaning. Children who had major operations only a day or two earlier seem comfortable. Some are provided with pumps they can activate as needed to inject pain killers through intravenous lines. Others have epidural catheters inserted in their backs, delivering medication into the space around the spinal cord to numb the lower part of the body. Such treatment provides steady control of pain, Berde says, and eliminates the need for the repeated shots most children dread...
Berde and his colleagues inserted a spinal catheter and gave the boy a local anesthetic and an opiate. The patient had been screaming; now he became comfortable and alert and was able to go home. Although that treatment had been used to control pain in adults, Berde says, "I don't know if it had been used much in kids. We had no protocol for it. But he clearly was terminal and not relieved by massive amounts of morphine...
...risks from anesthesia during the past 10 to 15 years, have brought about some substantial changes. "Now no newborn is too sick to get pain medication," Berde says. In general, there seems to be more effort to reduce kids' pain from all medical procedures, including bone-marrow biopsies, spinal taps and repeated blood drawings. Says Berde: "I think most major children's hospitals are changing. There is less willingness than there used to be to hold kids down and brutalize them...
...sense. The nerve cells that specialize in serotonin production originate in the raphe nuclei, in a region right atop the spine that nimh's Hyman calls "the deep basement of the brain." From there, these neurons extend vinelike projections called axons up through the brain and down into the spinal column. The axons form a sort of neurological interstate-highway network, over which serotonin supplies are sent to all parts of the nervous system. Other neurotransmitters are restricted to certain regions of the brain or the body; serotonin is just about everywhere...
...brain, is sometimes used as a sleeping pill. (A bad batch of L-tryptophan killed several people in the late 1980s and effectively killed the craze.) In another experiment, researchers discovered that when they stimulated raphe cells to release extra serotonin not in the brain but in the spinal cord, test subjects experienced pain relief...