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
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