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Anti-Nociceptive systems and Opioids
Chronic pain conditions might be due to an endorphin shortage
Date: 10/1/2008 11:02:27 PM ( 16 y ) ... viewed 2636 times
"The Anti-Nociceptive action"
This seems to be a fairly straightforward part of the chronic pain discussion, but we don't hear anything about it. There may be a reason why we don't hear the full story, but first let me tell you what I have been learning about lately:
"Nociceptive" signals are, basically, those nerve signals that come from the body when something bad has happened, like touching a hot stove. Pains are a way of protecting us, without pain we would not survive long.
The "anti-nociceptive effect" is how pains are ended once they have got their message through. When the protective job of pain is done the pains can end, and there has to be a system for doing that.
This way of reversing the pain involves the "MU Opioid" receptors, in our brain and spinal cord, which produce endorphins; those endorphins make us feel good and feeling good is a way of ending pain. This is NOT the same as "numbing" a part of the body with Novocaine - that just shuts the nerve down at the "injury site" in the body, so no signals are sent in the first place. Endorphins works differently, it works in the brain to end pain.
So, it seems possible then that with CHRONIC PAIN conditions there just might be a dysfunctioning MU Opioid/endorphin system. Maybe there has been damage - chemicals, toxins or even physical damage after a concussion - to that part of the brain and spinal cord where the MU Opioid systems exist.
After all, what chronic pain people have is "pain without tissue damage or nerve compression", that little factoid that they keep throwing at us to show that our pains are not real. They are WRONG though... pain is allways and only in the brain: people can have crushed legs and feel NO pain, and people with missing limbs CAN feel pain in that area - because the "map of the body" is in the brain and the brain is working to protect the body by making us feel pain somewhere on that map. I know, this gets a little weird, but thats how it works. This much is accepted by medical science now - MRI scans have helped prove it.
Maybe we chronic pain people feel pain that should have ended, because there are not enough endorphins to end that pain. And, pains start up without a good reason because when there are not enough endorphins almost any nerve signal can be turned into pain when that signal gets to the brain.
Now I have to ask a conspiratorial question: has the "endorphin/MU Opioid" part of the chronic pain discussion not been put forward because the solution is so obvious?
What I have not said anything about so far is why it is called the "MU Opioid" system. "Opioid" sounds a lot like opiate drugs. It is - we have a specific receptor there for that specific chemical produced by poppy plants. All vertebrates have it, no invertebrates have it. We evolved it, it is encoded in our genes.
So, one solution for chronic pain, if it is produced by a lack of endorphins, would be opiate drugs. Opiate drugs have a lot of uses because they act on the Central Nervous System to dampen pain signals [by using endorphins]. Replacing the missing endorphins by taking opiate drugs, which provide the basic stuff that the brain can use to make endorphins, seems obvious.
The drawback is addiction, and we become "chemically dependant" on the drug if we take it for just a week or so. Also, that there is "tolerance" where over time we need a little more of the drug to produce the same effect. However, those are balanced out by the fact that there is "no toxic limit" to opiate drugs - we can over dose by taking too big a dose, but no matter how big a dose your tolerance demands, opiate drugs never become toxic to the body. Allmost all pharmaceutical drugs DO have that "toxic limit"... they damage the liver or another organ. Also, there is NO pharmaceutical drug that is anywhere near as effective for ending pain as opiates. So, addiction, or toxicity? Toxicity is more or less permanent, and addiction can be permanent also, expecially considering the terrible withdrawals we go through when we stop taking the opiate drugs.
But there is it is - chronic pain people are told not to take opiate drugs despite the fact that opiates are such an obvious answer. I personally have been taking morphine [an opiate drug] for 16 years. It works well, and I am not having any problems from the drug itself... but I am having issues with tolerance, where I need more than the doctors are allowed to prescribe. Small, regular increases would have been all I needed, but the doctors are told to stop giving increases once a patient reaches the 300mgs/day level. There is no good reason for doing that, as far as I can see. It isn't the money - opiate drugs can be produced very cheaply, it is only prohibition laws that make them expensive on the streets - so I would imagine it is because the medical authorities, the "Colleges", are getting the word from the pharmaceutical corporations that other drugs should be used instead.
Opiate drugs literally DO grow on trees!! [so it is cheap to produce]
There is no patents for "plant-based medicines" [so there can be no huge profits]
Chronic pains are real, the cause might be an endorphin shortage, and if it is then the best solution might be opiate drugs.
I admit that I am in over my head, I don't everything about this topic, but I do know about my own pains and how opiates have helped me.
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PS - I should add that there are also other "feel good" brain chemicals - neurotransmitters such as seritonin and dopamine, but they might not have so much to do with the MU Opioid system, so I am ignoring them here.
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