How do pain medications work? How do they manage to alleviate even the worst of pain?
In: Biology
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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