If the medicine disrupts the pain message between brain and nerve, how do different medicines do this differently?
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Ibuprofen is a NSAID. It stops pain by reducing inflammation in your body. It blocks certain things in your body from being released which causes it to swell up and hurt when injured.
Acetaminophen/Paracetamol is still sort of a mystery on how it works
opioids work by blocking pain signals from your spinal cord to brain and relaxing your muscles
So ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory so it reduces inflamation, and thus any pain caused by inflamation.
Codein meanwhile is a muscle relaxant and thus Stops muscle pain.
Paracetamol I can’t remember sorry, but that should be a start.
Generally painkillers don’t really stop the pain receptors, that’s what anaesthetic does
So pain is complicated, there is a long chain of things that happen between having something that should pain you and you feeling pain. This conveniently gives us smart humans many ways it messing with it and preventing it.
So you are kinda right that pain has to be transmitted from the body to the brain by nerves and that’s one place where we can interrupt pain. Anesthetics usually are what target this, nerves pass along their message in part by suddenly flooding themselves with sodium, certain anesthetics prevent the nerve from doing this entirely.
But even with the nerves it’s pretty useful for the body to moderate pain depending on different circumstances, and the body has mechanisms for this. For example if you are running, say away from a bear, you probably don’t want to be feeling the pain from a cut at that moment, it only gets in the way. So we have chemicals in the body that are secreted in cases like this that go around the body, attach the nerves, and say “hey, send less pain to the brain it’s not needed right now.” Endorphins are one such chemical, and they attach to something called opioid receptors on the body, codeine is an opioid and also attaches to these opioid receptors, thus decreasing pain.
There are some other places where we can target pain here beside just the nerves.
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Pain isn’t magically discovered by the nerve endings where ever you get hit by a hammer or something. There we find nerves have a few different ways of detecting what causes “pain.”
Pain is usually caused by something naturally that is harmful to the body in the area, something that irritates the local area and nerves to send a signal up to the brain to get you to know something is wrong on this part of your body. Nerves for instance are pre wired to handle certain things, if there’s too much heat there’s are sensors for this on the nerves which trigger and send along the signal. You get cut, a nerve gets cut in half and as it’s final message sends along a message of “hey I got cut.” And of course there is inflammation.
Inflammation is a reaction in a local area to irritation, whenever a bunch of cells gets annoyed at something. Cells at this point start secreting the “hey we need help here” chemical to the surrounding area and neighboring cells help these cells out in ways they can, blood vessels expand to allow for more blood to flow into the local area to help, white blood cells are attracted to the chemical and come to help fight any potential infection that might happen, blood coagulates to prepare to clot to stop bleeding, etc. But on top of this these chemicals also are picked up by nerves and nerves are designed to treat them as a source of pain in order to get you to pay attention and prevent further damage to/help the area heal. This is why when you get cut there is the immediate pain of your nerve picking up damage to it then the subsequent pain resulting in the inflammation.
Ibuprofen and paracetamol target this inflammation system, they target the “hey I need help here” chemicals all over the body to reduce inflammation, a side product of which is preventing pain. Paracetamol seems to do the same though targets mainly the interaction between these chemicals and the nerves, doesn’t actually reduce inflammation much. Anyways for this reason neither of these will help you much if you get cut while using them, at least not help prevent the immediate pain of getting cut.
There are a lot of other ways to mess with pain in the body. But this covers at least the 3 you asked for.
Hi. Doctor here. Pain medicine is a proper specialty (therefore a complex subject), but the TLDR is as follows:
Like any electrical signal, pain has an entire travel pathway from the furthest nerve ending where it originates to the pain-processing-centres in the brain. Intercept the signal anywhere along the path, you get pain relief.
Some pain killers stop the signal at the source (nerve ending) by reducing inflammation, like Ibuprofen.
Others stop the signal from being processed in the brain centers, like Paracetamol and Opioids, among others.
There are many levels, receptors and painkiller strengths involved but I hope this simplification helps.
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