Heroin Addiction Explained: How Opioids Hijack the Brain - The New York Times
THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC is devastating America. Overdoses have passed car crashes and gun violence to become the leading cause of death for Americans under 55. The epidemic has killed more people than H.I.V. at the peak of that disease, and its death toll exceeds those of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq combined. Funerals for young people have become common. Every 11 minutes, another life is lost.So why do so many people start using these drugs? Why don ' t they stop?Some people are more susceptible to addiction than others. But nobody is immune. For many, opioids like heroin entice by bestowing an immediate sense ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - December 20, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
This Chemical Is So Hot It Destroys Nerve Fibers —in a Good Way - WIRED
In Morocco there grows a cactus-like plant that's so hot, I have to insist that the next few sentences aren't hyperbole. On the Scoville Scale of hotness, its active ingredient, resiniferatoxin, clocks in at 16 billion units. That's 10,000 times hotter than the Carolina reaper, the world's hottest pepper, and 45,000 times hotter than the hottest of habaneros, and 4.5 million times hotter than a piddling little jalapeno. Euphorbia resinifera, aka the resin spurge, is not to be eaten. Just to be safe, you probably shouldn't even look at it.But while that toxicity will lay up any mammal dumb enough to chew...
Source: Psychology of Pain - November 15, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Pain treatment complicated by doctors' opioid fears - The Washington Post
I felt a shake and opened my eyes. The clock read 1:30 a.m."We need to go to the hospital," my mother whispered in my ear, clutching her stomach.She knew; it was the same pain she had experienced many times before.We were in California, many miles from home, many miles from my father (a doctor), who always knew what to do. At the time, I was early in my medical school training, although I knew all the intricate details of my mother's medical history and realized she needed to get medical attention.When we arrived at the local emergency room in an affluent neighborhood, my mother was placed in a wheelchair and...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 29, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Illusions as Painkillers: the Analgesic Value of Resizing Illusions in Knee Osteoarthritis - Scientific American
Research has shown that the experience of pain is highly subjective: people feel more or less pain, in identical physical situations, as a function of their mood and attention. This flexibility showcases the potential for cognitive manipulations to decrease the pain associated with a variety of pathologies. As an example, the virtual-reality game"Snow World" (in which game in which players shoot snowballs to defeat snowman Frosty and his penguins) reportedly works better than morphine at counteracting the pain of patients in burn units. Other studies have indicated that virtual reality manipulations of the patien...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 21, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Pain Narrative Videos | Pain Education and Advocacy | University of New England
UNE's Center for Excellence in Neurosciences and Interprofessional Education Collaborative have partnered to create this collection of pain narrative videos as part of a group of interprofessional training materials. These materials were crafted to aid future practitioners in providing the highest quality of care to patients experiencing chronic pain. They highlight the importance of working interprofessionally and approaching the patient as a whole person when in treatment. Included are outcomes from a project funded in part by the Maine Cancer Foundation to examine cancer pain from an interprofessional perspective an...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 19, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Too Good to Be True? A Nonaddictive Opioid without Lethal Side Effects Shows Promise - Scientific American
With nearly 50,000 drug overdose deaths from opioids last year and an estimated two million Americans addicted, the opioid crisis continues to rage throughout the U.S. This statistic must be contrasted with another: 25 million Americans live with daily chronic pain, for which few treatment options are available apart from opioid medications.Opioid drugs like morphine and Oxycontin are still held as the gold standard when it comes to relieving pain. But it has become brutally obvious that opioids have dangerous side effects, including physical dependence, addiction and the impaired breathing that too often leads to death fr...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 19, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Body in Mind - Research into the role of the brain and mind in chronic pain - University of South Australia
Here is our vision: To provide a credible and reliable channel through which clinical pain scientists can bring their scientific discoveries straight into the real world. We reckon that the communication bit of science is the bit that often drags the chain of knowledge development and transfer. We want to communicate our science better. We want to side-step, or perhaps leap-frog, the arduous journey that new discoveries make before they have the opportunity to influence the real world. We want people to share in our fascination with the fearful and wonderful complexity of the human; we want people to understand the scienti...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 17, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Most Doctors Are Ill-Equipped to Deal With the Opioid Epidemic. Few Medical Schools Teach Addiction. - The New York Times
To the medical students, the patient was a conundrum.According to his chart, he had residual pain from a leg injury sustained while working on a train track. Now he wanted an opioid stronger than the Percocet he'd been prescribed. So why did his urine test positive for two other drugs — cocaine and hydromorphone, a powerful opioid that doctors had not ordered?It was up to Clark Yin, 29, to figure out what was really going on with Chris McQ, 58 — as seven other third-year medical students and two instructors watched."How are you going to have a conversation around the patient's positive tox screen results?&...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 14, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
A New Arizona Law Limits A Doctor's Freedom To Prescribe Painkillers : Shots - Health News : NPR
It started with a rolled ankle during a routine training exercise.Shannon Hubbard never imagined it was the prologue to one of the most debilitating pain conditions known to exist, calledcomplex regional pain syndrome.It's a condition that causes the nervous system to go haywire, creating pain disproportionate to the actual injury. It can also affect how the body regulates temperature and blood flow.For Hubbard, it manifested several years ago following surgery on her foot. That's a common way for it to take hold."My leg feels like it's on fire pretty much all the ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - July 8, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The Neuroscience of Pain | The New Yorker
On a foggy February morning in Oxford, England, I arrived at the John Radcliffe Hospital, a shiplike nineteen-seventies complex moored on a hill east of the city center, for the express purpose of being hurt. I had an appointment with a scientist named Irene Tracey, a brisk woman in her early fifties who directs Oxford University's Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and has become known as the Queen of Pain."We might have a problem with you being a ginger," she warned when we met. Redheads typically perceive pain differently from those with other hair colors; many also flinch at the use of the G-wo...
Source: Psychology of Pain - June 25, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
HEAL Initiative | National Institutes of Health (NIH)
In April 2018, NIH launched the HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-term) Initiative, an aggressive, trans-agency effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis. This Initiative will build on extensive, well-established NIH research, including basic science of the complex neurological pathways involved in pain and addiction, implementation science to develop and test treatment models, and research to integrate behavioral interventions with Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD). Successes from this research include the development of the nasal form of naloxo...
Source: Psychology of Pain - June 12, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
How health insurers are making America ’s opioid epidemic worse - Vox
Mandy has now been in recovery from her opioid addiction for more than two months — and she ' s ready to keep that going. But the 29-year-old in the Chicago area is now dealing with a big obstacle: her health insurer.Mandy, who asked I use only her first name, said she struggled with addiction for six years. It started with back pain, which a doctor tried to treat with Vicodin. " I had tried [opioids] in high school, " she said. " I had an older boyfriend, and I tried some of his wisdom teeth painkillers to get high off of. And I was like, ' Whoa, this is awesome. ' When I got a Vicodin prescription for my back, I w...
Source: Psychology of Pain - June 5, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
BBC - Future - Pain bias: The health inequality rarely discussed
In 2009, my doctor told me that, like"a lot of women", I was paying too much attention to my body. Saying there wasn't an issue, he suggested I just relax and try to ignore the symptoms.The decision seemed to run counter to what my records showed. A few weeks earlier, I had ended up in the emergency room with chest pains and a heart rate hitting 220 beats per minute. The ER crew told me it was a panic attack, gave me Xanax and told me to try to sleep.I'd had panic attacks before. I knew this episode was not one. So I went to my doctor.He put me on a heart monitor overnight. Bingo: I had another episode, t...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 31, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
NIH Pain Consortium
The NIH Pain Consortium was established to enhance pain research and promote collaboration among researchers across the many NIH Institutes and Centers that have programs and activities addressing pain. To this end, the following goals have been identified for the Pain Consortium:• To develop a comprehensive and forward-thinking pain research agenda for the NIH - one that builds on what we have learned from our past efforts.• To identify key opportunities in pain research, particularly those that provide for multidisciplinary and trans-NIH participation.• To increase visibility for pain research - both within the NIH...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 31, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Chronic pain treatment: Psychotherapy, not opioids, has been proven to work - Vox
When pain settled into Blair Golson's hands, it didn't let go.What started off as light throbbing in one wrist 10 years ago quickly engulfed the other. The discomfort then spread, producing a pain much"like slapping your hands against a concrete wall," he says. He was constantly stretching them, constantly shaking them, while looking for hot or cold surfaces to lay them on for relief.But worse was the deep sense of catastrophe that accompanied the pain. Working in tech-related startups, he depended on his hands to type."Every time the pain got bad, I would think some variation of,'Oh no, I'm ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 20, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
