I’ve been told before that opiates aren’t useful for chronic pain, but I always assumed that was due to the risk of addiction. I had major surgery recently and was on morphine in the hospital and Vicodin after leaving. I hardly experienced any pain from the surgical site while on the medications, but my chronic shoulder pain seemed to be unaffected. Can anyone explain why this would be the case?
In: Biology
If you are alive, you have a liver and a brain.
Too much med in the brain, the brain make a bunch of complicated pathways and upregulation/downregulation (certainly not ELI5) that make the brain less sensitive to that medication.
Too much med in the liver, the liver make a bunch of complex metabolic pathways (certainly not ELI5) that make the med go away faster in the blood.
The simpler the structure of the med, the simpler it is for the brain and the liver to adjust to the med and make it look like the med is not working, because, in fact, the med is now only preventing withdrawal syndromes, but not having a direct beneficial effect.
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