I have chronic muscle pain and one time I took something similar to MDMA in a party, the feeling I had when I took it was a warm feeling going down from my neck to my legs and removing all the pain along the way. Fast forward a few years and my doctor gave me a SNRI for the pain, and I had a very very similar feeling where the pain just disappeared even though I could feel that my muscles were still tense.
I tried searching it but the explanation is not that easy to understand; how do these types of drugs help with pain exactly, especially muscular pain?
In: Biology
There is no simple answer, because those two substances have many different roles in different parts of the brain/body. Just to give you an example, if you were to inject serotonin into your skin, the result would be intense pain, because in your skin serotonin is used as a pain signal. In the case of dopamine, there is one part of the brain that uses dopamine to turn lactation on and off (tuberoinfundibular pathway) another that uses dopamine to regulate the initiation of movement (nigrostriatal pathway, see also Parkinsons), and so on. In the circulatory system, dopamine is used as a signal in the regulation of blood pressure.
Many of the systems that use those neurotransmitters are poorly understood, which is why I can’t really answer your question. The true answer probably involves the regulation of priorities in the brain, e.g. something similar to how immiment physical danger can temporarily suppress the sensation (or at least the immediacy) of pain.
Source: PhD in neuroscience
AFAIK the exact mechanisms of how these drugs help with pain are not entirely understood.
Disclaimer: The following is very simplified!
Serotonin and dopamine are two of both neurotransmitters, essentially functioning as “off-switches” (serotonin) and “on-switches” (dopamine can be both) for neurons in the brain.
Neurons communicate by excitating or inhibiting other neurons, and to do this they release a neurotransmitter at the end of their “wires/tails” (axons), which are in contact with other neurons “recievers” (dendrites). This microscopic gap between the axon and dendrites are called the synaptic cleft. The neurotransmitter is released into this cleft and bind to receptors of the “recieving” neuron, which then either excitate or inhibit the neuron.
Then the neurotransmitter is reabsorbed back into the neuron and recycled for future use.
Drugs like SSRI and SNRI works by inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin (and noradrenaline for SNRI), essentially giving serotonin more time to do its thing in the synaptic cleft, enhancing its effect so to speak.
Serotonin receptors has been identified in the brain in areas having to so with pain (amongst many other functions). This is how far my knowledge goes regarding the mechanism, and i’m not sure how much further the mechanisms are actually understood. Maybe someone else can chip in.
Dopamine has recently been discovered to being of influence to chronic pain iirc. I don’t remember more exact details.
But yea, basically the drugs like SSRI and SNRI work by regulating neurotransmitters, that has to do with areas in the brain which are involved with pain, amongst other things.
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