Burn, baby, burn... on strep throat, insufficient anesthesia, and other woes

Disclaimer: This is not a real advertisement, it is not a real product,and Jackie Chan has not endorsed it. Yet.So, it happened that over the last Thanksgiving I was stricken for the first time with the dreaded strep throat. A miserable business. In addition to the antibiotics, the Doc gave me a prescription for a lidocaine rinse to ease what was a surprisingly incredible amount of pain for a sore throat. Turned out to be about as useful as a snooze button on a smoke detector. You can't swish and gargle the stuff because it's as viscous as honey, but you're not supposed to swallow it either (presumably because you don't want to anesthetize your esophagus and/or risk absorbing the lidocaine systemically through the stomach). So, after much fuster-cluckery all I ended up with was a completely numb mouth and tongue and... a really sore throat.The pain did stimulate my thoughts, though. Specifically, with regard to why the hell a lidocaine/QX-314 combination still isn't available on prescription yet. Let me explain. It all started with a paper published in Nature, 2007, which I rank among the most compelling that I've ever read relating to my particular area of interest:Bit of background for the uninitiated. Local anesthetics such as lidocaine work by blocking voltage-gated Na+ channels located on the plasma membrane surface encapsulating all neurons, the activity of which is essential for action potential propagation. Block these channels and you block action potential prop...
Source: Across the Bilayer - Category: Medical Scientists Source Type: blogs