eli5 How does paracetamol work?
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It may get lost, but I would love to share my analogy I often tell patients (Im a nurse) about how different pain killers can work.
Think of pain as a telephone conversation between The Operator, your brain, and a Caller, or the site of the pain. The phone line are the nerves carrying that conversation back and forth. Generally speaking pretty well all analgesics (pain relievers) do their work somewhere along that conversation.
Some pain medications, like NSAIDS (ibuprofen) tend to work on the callers end by lowering the volume of their screams. The Operator is still listening we just arent hurting their ears as bad.
Other ones like Tylenol, tend to work at the operators end, like turning down the volume on their headset.
And still other ones work on the phone line itself (the nerves) to reduce the amount of ‘electrical interference’ that make the operator believe there is a screamer somewhere on the line, this would be neuropathic pain. This can even help me explain “phantom pain”, or pain someone believes is coming from a body part thats been cut off. The Operator is still getting phone calls from the Caller somehow even though the Callers number has been disconnected.
And we are constantly learning more about how things work, or work differently than we thought.
For instance research has suggested that Marijuanas method of action in pain isn’t by changing the volume of the conversation, but by like being a warm hug around the Operator telling it, “Bro, we dont care if anyone out there is yelling or not, everythings going to be just fine if we just get some Doritos.”
Pain is a bugger, and can be really difficult to deal with. But with a little understanding of where in that conversation we need the help can help us decide how to help it.
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