How do pain medications work? How do they manage to alleviate even the worst of pain?
In: Biology
Pain medications contain chemicals that cease the signals in your nerves that are telling the body that it hurts. When you are hurt and in pain your cells release a chemical called prostaglandin which your nerve endings that sense pain are sensitive to, the pain medication stops this chemical from being produced.
They don’t necessarily. They basically make you ignore the pain. This is why “Pain” medications are usually coupled with things like Ibuprofen. The Ibuprofen does the actual pain-killing while the opiate makes you just not care about it or be as aware of the pain. You can actually increase the amount something hurts by up to 40% (study I read a long time ago so take with a grain of salt) just by focusing on it, your brain will send extra pain signals as you are extremely aware of the issue. The opiate basically knocks that awareness down quite a few levels.
Ever heard someone saying “Pain is an information.”? Well they’re right. Pain is just an information your nerves send to your brain. It’s a useful information cause it usually mean that something in your body is going bad. Like your hand in a fire.
Well painkiller can work in a few ways. One is to prevent the signal altogether from reaching the brain. Dangerous of course but can allow you to keep going. If your brain doesn’t know it hurt, then you don’t feel it.
The second way is that your brain actually has a failsafe against pain. There is a scale for pain that goes from 0 to 10. It (mostly) can’t go above that, simply because your brain will release a chemical to stop the signal by itself. If it ever reach pain 11, the brain use that chemical to stop you from going mad. There are some case where an can go higher, mostly from some venoms where the chemical supposed to stop pain from going above 10 is prevented.
TL:DR pain happen when your brain treat the “pain” information sent by nerves on the body. Painkiller can either intercept the pain signal or forcibly trigger the “too much pain” failsafe our brain is built with.
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