Introduction:
Somehow, the drug seems to know where we were injured, and it doesn't hurt after the drug. In fact, painkillers are not bullets fired by sharpshooters, but more like many shotguns exploding at the same time. They travel through the bloodstream to find and eliminate pain.
You can think of your body's nervous system as a mass of telegraph wires, and a series of disaster reports from all over the country enter the intelligence center, your brain, and the brain feels pain. If you want to alleviate this suffering, you need to stop the sender, interfere with the telegraph line, or send a spy to intercept the message.
Painkillers interference:
What painkillers do is implement these measures without blocking nerve impulses, interfering with sensory perception, or altering consciousness. Anti-inflammatory drugs, for example, reduce pain by reducing inflammation. Other painkillers include COX inhibitors and opioids. When none of these drugs work, doctors resort to anesthetics to cut off all perception, including pain.
To better understand how this works, let's first look at the physiology of pain.
The study and theory of pain began in the 19th century, but medical and technological advances over the past 40 years have revolutionized the field. One of the common models is shown below.
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Example:
Let's say you touch a hot stove and burn your hand, and in an instant your arm will fall back and then feel pain. Because the human body has a specialized neural network called nociceptors. Unlike other nerve types, nociceptors only trigger when harmful events are detected, such as excessive heat and pressure. At this point, these nerves convert these stimuli into electrical signals that are quickly transmitted to the brain.
How is it done? Their nerve endings change shape to form pores that allow positive ions such as sodium and calcium to rush in. This reduces the voltage on the cell membrane and creates a potential. The more severe the injury, the stronger the signal.
How pain nerves alert the brain:
Now that we know how pain nerves alert the brain, how do nociceptors detect injury? There are many reasons, some of which scientists are still studying. But often, nociceptors can detect chemicals like prostaglandins. They are not pain molecules, but chemicals that help with various body functions. But they should not be where nociceptors can be received, unless something unexpected happens.
In addition to such unexpected chemicals, nociceptors can directly detect harmful effects, such as excessive temperatures, which can open ion channels on their own.
Research:
Studies have shown that people of different genders, races, life experiences, and cultures feel pain differently, in part because severe pain can alter your nervous system at the molecular level, especially if you often feel the same pain or are young at the time.
Although pain can remind our body to heal quickly, it is really irritating if the brain is buzzing all the time. One way to mute pain is to cut off the signal directly at the source. This is what ibuprofen does, which blocks or reduces the production and release of prostaglandins.
Others play a pain-relieving role in the brain and central nervous system, such as acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol. Although researchers have not yet fully grasped how it works. Most other non-opioid analgesics relieve pain by inhibiting COX (cyclooxygenase), a key enzyme that catalyzes the conversion of arachidonic acid to prostaglandins.
The absence of prostaglandins means that the nociceptors are not activated, so there is no pain. More drastic medical treatments, such as mobile phones, require general anesthesia. It was a mixture of drugs that calmed the patient to stay in a coma, relax muscles and reduce pain.
Therefore, although it seems that painkillers can reduce pain in different parts with a high degree of localization, in fact, the doctor decides which painkiller to use for you according to where you hurt and what kind of pain, and the drugs of different ingredients will go back to each home, find each mother, find the kind of pain signal it targets and take measures such as truncation/interference.
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