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My mother was in unbearable pain, but the ER staff didn’t seem to believe her

By Ersilia M. DeFilippis I felt a shake and opened my eyes. The clock read 1:30 a.m. “We need to go to the hospital,” my mother whispered in my ear, clutching her stomach. She knew; it was the same pain she had experienced many times before. We were in California, many miles from home, many miles from my father (a doctor), who always knew what to do. At the time, I was early in my medical school training, although I knew all the intricate details of my mother’s medical history and realized she needed to get medical attention. When we arrived at the local emergency room in an affluent neighborhood, my mother was placed in a wheelchair and taken to the waiting room. She curled up on the cold barren hospital floor, the only position she could find comfortable. Although my mother usually puts on lipstick and high heels to go to the grocery store, this time, her hair was unkempt and her pajamas worn out. Her knees were tucked into her chest and her belly was distended. It should have been clear to onlookers that she was in agonizing pain, but people were hesitant, skeptical even. “Ma’am,” someone yelled. “Ma’am, we can’t have you lying on the floor. Get up.” My mother lay still. “Get up, ma’am,” she was told again, again more forcibly. They helped her back into the wheelchair. “Help me,” she said. “The pain is unbearable.” Reluctantly, they put her in a stretcher and prepared to place an IV in her arm. To convince them the pain was real, we asked them to call my father, who could fill in all of the medical details: her multiple prior hospitalizations, surgeries and diagnoses. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 25511 - Posted: 10.01.2018

A different way to relieve years of back pain

By Lisa Rein In my first Feldenkrais class, we lay on our backs with eyes closed and drifted our eyeballs left to right and back again. We shifted our heads from side to side as our eyes followed in their sockets. Then we changed it up, moving our eyes in the opposite direction from our heads. This may sound like a simple sequence. It’s deceptively challenging. And it continued for an hour, with sitting variations, eyes alternately open and shut, a brain workout that included tracking our thumbs as our bent arms moved at eye level from left to right and back again. These eye calisthenics were supposed to relieve my years of back pain. Yeah, right, I remember thinking that Sunday morning 18 months ago as I felt an odd exhaustion set in. Slow and subtle was harder than I thought. I fidgeted. My eyes grew tired. How was all of this commotion under my lids supposed to stop my right hip from unnecessary rotation when I walked and unfreeze my left shoulder and neck? I had tried the Feldenkrais Method under some duress. Although there aren’t a lot of good studies, my friend Jon told me it had reduced his lower back pain from excruciating to manageable. Too many chiropractors, osteopaths, yoga classes, trainers, acupuncturists and ibuprofen over 30 years of back pain. They had at best given me only temporary relief — or sometimes more pain. Feldenkrais sounded too nuanced, with its slow and subtle movements that were supposed to retrain how I walked, sat or held myself as I typed a story on my computer. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Caffeine May Increase Pain Tolerance

By Nicholas Bakalar Consuming caffeine regularly may increase the ability to withstand pain, a small study suggests. Researchers recruited 62 men and women, ages 19 to 77, and had them record their daily caffeine intake from coffee, tea, soda, energy drinks and chocolate. They averaged 170 milligrams of caffeine a day, about the amount in two cups of coffee, although 15 percent of the group consumed more than 400 milligrams a day. The study is in Psychopharmacology. After seven days, they took the volunteers into a laboratory to test their pain tolerance using calibrated devices that gradually increased heat or pressure on a volunteer’s forearm or back. The people pressed a button on a hand-held device first when the sensation became painful, and then again when it became intolerable. The experiment controlled for sex and race, current tobacco use and alcohol consumption, among other variables that could affect pain sensation. Still, they found that the more caffeine consumed, the greater the tolerance for pain. “Diet can actually be a useful intervention for decreasing pain sensitivity,” said the lead author, Burel R. Goodin, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “It’s not just caffeine. A study has shown, for example, that a plant-based diet can actually help increase pain tolerance.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Ticket To Ride: Pot Sellers Put Seniors On The Canna-Bus

Stephanie O'Neill Shirley Avedon, 90, had never been a cannabis user. But carpal tunnel syndrome that sends shooting pains into both of her hands and an aversion to conventional steroid and surgical treatments is prompting her to consider some new options. "It's very painful, sometimes I can't even open my hand," Avedon says. So for the second time in two months, she's climbed on board a bus that provides seniors at the Laguna Woods Village retirement community in Orange County, Calif., with a free shuttle to a nearby marijuana dispensary. The retired manager of an oncology office says she's seeking the same relief she saw cancer patients get from smoking marijuana 25 years ago. "At that time (marijuana) wasn't legal, so they used to get it off their children," she says with a laugh. "It was fantastic what it did for them." Avedon, who doesn't want to get high from anything she uses, picked up a topical cream on her first trip that was sold as a pain reliever. It contained cannabidiol or CBD, but was formulated without THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, marijuana's psychoactive ingredient. "It helped a little," she says. "Now I'm going back for the second time hoping they have something better." As more states legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use — 30 states plus the District of Columbia to date — the cannabis industry is booming. Among the fastest growing group of users: people over 50, with especially steep increases among those 65 and older. And some dispensaries are tailoring their pitches to seniors like Avedon who are seeking alternatives treatments for their aches, pains and other medical conditions. © 2018 npr

Here’s how one woman used an implant to get some relief from chronic back pain

By Erin Blakemore Janet Jay is a cyborg. No, she’s not RoboCop or Darth Vader. But she shares a similarity with those characters: Her all-too-human body has been upgraded with a machine. A next-generation implant deep in Jay’s back stimulates her spinal cord, overriding her body’s pain signals to give her some relief from the back pain that has plagued her for years. In an article on Popular Science’s website, Jay writes about her experience with pain and the next-generation way she’s finding relief. She is hardly alone in her suffering. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, an estimated 25.3 million Americans, or 11.2 percent of U.S. adults, experience chronic pain. It can interfere with work and home life and leave patients debilitated, disabled and depressed. So it makes sense that Jay jumped at the chance to experience long-term pain relief with the help of a spinal-cord stimulator. Jay lays out the hows and whys of spinal stimulation, and she paints a vivid picture of a life in agony, a journey that has included skeptical doctors, plenty of painkillers and unanswered questions about the future. She also describes her path to spinal stimulation, how the device works with the body to short-circuit pain, and the many roadblocks to relief that patients face. “Even for me, the battle is not over,” Jay writes. “Since this surgery I’ve actually had another disc herniate, complicating everything. My spine isn’t cured, and I still hurt all the time. But the pain is far more controlled, and I can function much better at my current level of discomfort.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Brain features may reveal if placebo pills could treat chronic pain

Aimee Cunningham Certain brain and personality characteristics may help predict whether a sugar pill can provide relief to someone suffering from chronic pain. In a small study, patients with persistent back pain who responded to a placebo treatment benefitted from up to a 33 percent reduction in their pain intensity. These people had distinctive features in their brains and certain personality traits, researchers report online September 12 in Nature Communications. About 20 percent of U.S. adults, or about 50 million people, had chronic pain in 2016, according to new data released September 13 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Chronic pain was defined as feeling pain on most days, if not every day, over the previous six months. Being able to identify people who respond to a placebo might mean doctors could give these individuals the option of a pain reliever that’s cheap, free of side effects and — unlike opioids, which are often prescribed to treat persistent pain — not addictive. “We need to seriously think about placebo as a treatment option, especially in chronic pain patients,” says neuroscientist and study coauthor A. Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

How the poppy got its pain-relieving powers

Laurel Hamers A draft of the poppy’s genetic instruction book is providing clues to how the plant evolved to produce molecules such as morphine. Scientists pieced together the genome of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum). Then, they identified a cluster of 15 close-together genes that help the plant synthesize a group of chemically related compounds that includes powerful painkillers like morphine as well as other molecules with potential medical properties (SN: 6/10/17, p. 22). A group of genes that help poppy plants produce some of these molecules, collectively known as benzylisoquinoline alkaloids, have been clustered together for tens of millions of years, researchers report online August 30 in Science. But the plant’s morphine production evolved more recently. Around 7.8 million years ago, the plant copied its entire genome. Some of the resulting surplus genes evolved new roles helping poppies produce morphine, because the plant already had at least one other copy of those genes carrying out their original jobs. It wasn’t a one-step process, though. An even earlier gene duplication event caused two genes to fuse into one. That hybrid gene is responsible for a key shape-shift in alkaloid precursors, directing those molecules down the chemical pathway toward morphinelike compounds instead of other benzylisoquinoline alkaloids (SN Online: 6/25/15). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Illusions as Painkillers: the Analgesic Value of Resizing Illusions

By Susana Martinez-Conde Research has shown that the experience of pain is highly subjective: people feel more or less pain, in identical physical situations, as a function of their mood and attention. This flexibility showcases the potential for cognitive manipulations to decrease the pain associated with a variety of pathologies. As an example, the virtual-reality game “Snow World” (in which game in which players shoot snowballs to defeat snowman Frosty and his penguins) reportedly works better than morphine at counteracting the pain of patients in burn units. Other studies have indicated that virtual reality manipulations of the patient’s own body can also help ameliorate pain: an experiment conducted by neuroscientist Maria Victoria Sanchez-Vives and her team at the University of Barcelona in Spain showed that heat applied to experimental participants’ wrists felt more painful when their virtual arms turned red than when they turned blue or green. Following on this tradition, a study published PeerJ last month showed that visuotactile illusions can help the pain experienced by patients suffering from knee osteoarthritis. According to lead author Tasha Stanton, from the University of South Australia, the idea for the study originated from her observation that “people with knee osteoarthritis have an altered perception of their own body. [Their affected knee] often feels too big, and they also have changes to the way that touch and movement information is represented in the brain.” She hypothesized that patients may “respond to illusions that change the way their knee looks.” © 2018 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 25390 - Posted: 08.28.2018

New labour pain drug may reduce need for epidurals – UK study

Sarah Boseley Health editor A new drug to relieve pain during labour works better than pethidine, which has been in widespread use since the 1950s even though it has long been known it does not help all women, say researchers. Pethidine is given as an injection, but a new study funded by the National Institute for Health Research shows that remifentanil, which women control by pressing a button when they feel pain, appears to be more effective. Women using remifentanil were half as likely to end up asking for an epidural, which blocks all pain and sensation and often leads to a forceps delivery. Pethidine was the first opioid drug that was allowed to be given by a midwife alone and was very widely adopted, said Dr Matthew Wilson, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield and the lead author of the study published in the Lancet medical journal. More than a quarter of a million women in labour are given pethidine each year in the UK, even though up to 40% do not find it helpful, he said. “Some women do not report any useful pain relief at all and it has significant side effects,” he said. That includes sedation and potentially affecting the baby. “There has been a longstanding need for something else,” he said. Epidurals are by far the most effective form of pain relief, but women who have them are more likely to end up with their baby having a forceps or vacuum delivery. That can sometimes cause damage to the mother and have long-term consequences, including sexual problems. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Tiny bits of RNA can trigger pain and itchiness

Tina Hesman Saey Some snippets of RNA can be a real pain. A microRNA called miR-30c-5p contributes to nerve pain in rats and people, a new study finds. A different microRNA, miR-711, interacts with a well-known itch-inducing protein to cause itching, a second study concludes. Together, the research highlights the important role that the small pieces of genetic material can play in nerve cell function, and may help researchers understand the causes of chronic nerve pain and itch. MicroRNAs help regulate gene activity and protein production. The small molecules play a big role in controlling cancer (SN: 8/28/10, p. 18) and other aspects of health and disease (SN: 2/20/16, p. 18). Usually, microRNAs work by pairing up with bigger pieces of RNA called messenger RNAs, or mRNA. Messenger RNAs contain copies of genetic instructions that are read by cellular machinery to build proteins. When microRNAs glom onto the messengers, the mRNA can be degraded or the microRNAs can prevent the protein-building machinery from reading the instructions. Either way, the result is typically to dial down production of certain proteins. In the case of nerve pain, miR-30c-5p limits production of an important protein called TGF-beta that’s involved in controlling pain, María Hurlé, a pharmacologist at the University of Cantabria in Santander, Spain, and colleagues report August 8 in Science Translational Medicine. The researchers discovered the link in experiments with mice, rats and people. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

To Fix That Pain In Your Back, You Might Have To Change The Way You Sit

Michaeleen Doucleff My back hurts when I sit down. It's been going on for 10 years. It really doesn't matter where I am — at work, at a restaurant, even on our couch at home. My lower back screams, "Stop sitting!" To try to reduce the pain, I bought a kneeling chair at work. Then I got a standing desk. Then I went back to a regular chair because standing became painful. I've seen physical therapists, orthopedic surgeons and pain specialists. I've mastered Pilates, increased flexibility and strengthened muscles. At one point, my abs were so strong my husband nicknamed them "the plate." All these treatments helped a bit, at first. But the pain never really went away. So a few years ago, I decided to accept reality: Sitting down is — and will always be — painful for me. Then back in November, I walked into the studio of Jenn Sherer in Palo Alto, Calif. She is part of a growing movement on the West Coast to teach people to move and sit and stand as they did in the past — and as they still do in other parts of the world. I was interviewing Sherer for a story about bending. But she could tell I was in pain. So I told her my story. Her response left me speechless: "Sitting is a place where you can find heaven in your joints and in your back," she says. "It's not sitting that's causing the pain, it's how you're sitting. "Do you want me to show you how?" © 2018 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 25322 - Posted: 08.13.2018

Ghost peppers are saving U.S. grasslands—by scaring off hungry mice

By Elizabeth Gamillo Conservationists trying to restore the United States’s grasslands kept running into a problem: As soon as they planted the seeds meant to bring back native flora, hungry mice would gobble them up. In an effort to deter the rodents, biologists tried coating the seeds with capsaicin, the active ingredient that gives chili peppers their signature fiery taste. It worked: Dusting the seeds with chili powder reduced the number of seeds consumed by deer mice by 86%, researchers report in Restoration Ecology. The hot discovery required some trial and error. One big challenge was finding a chili powder that would deter the mice but not prevent the seeds from germinating. Another was finding a coating that wouldn’t weather away after a few months outdoors. After 4 years of laboratory and field experiments in Montana’s Missoula Valley, researchers found a workable recipe. A powder made from the Bhut jolokia, or ghost pepper, from India—considered to be one of the world’s hottest chilis—did the trick. The scientists suggest their findings demonstrate how nontoxic, natural plant defense compounds—such as capsaicin—can be used to aid restoration efforts. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Migraine Drug Wins EU Approval

Ashley Yeager European health officials have approved the sale of the migraine-prevention drug Aimovig (erenumab), The Guardian reports today (July 31). In May, the US Food and Drug Administration gave the green light for the same drug, considered a first of its kind because it blocks a receptor that plays a role in transmitting signals of migraine pain. “Migraine is incredibly painful, and has symptoms that include vomiting and visual disturbance, so getting it frequently can literally ruin lives,” Wendy Thomas, chief executive of the Migraine Trust, tells The Guardian. “That is why it is important that [the drug] becomes available to patients as soon as possible.” Aimovig targets the calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) receptor, and in clinical trials the compound was shown to reduce the number of days individuals suffered migraines each month. One in four patients with chronic migraines—those experiencing symptoms 15 days or more a month—were migraine-free for more than 15 months. “A treatment specifically designed for migraine prevention is a much welcomed innovation and could transform lives of patients for whom current therapies do not work or are not well tolerated,” Patrick Little, president of the European Migraine and Headache Alliance, said in a June 30 statement from Novartis, the company that manufactures Aimovig. In the trials, the drug was tested on migraine sufferers who did not get relief from two to four other commonly used migraine treatments. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientis

Words Matter When Talking About Pain With Your Doctor

Patti Neighmond If you're in the hospital or a doctor's office with a painful problem, you'll likely be asked to rate your pain on a scale of 0 to 10 – with 0 meaning no pain at all and 10 indicating the worst pain you can imagine. But many doctors and nurses say this rating system isn't working and they're trying a new approach. The numeric pain scale may just be too simplistic, says Dr. John Markman, Director of the Translational Pain Research Program at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. It can lead doctors to "treat by numbers," he says and as a result, patients may not be getting the most effective treatment for their pain. Take the case of 33-year-old Adam Rosette, who was recently hospitalized for fibrous dysplasia, a bone disorder that made it nearly impossible for him to chew or even speak. After brain surgery to remove benign tumors related to the disorder, he was definitely in pain. But he was reluctant to label the pain too high. "I don't think I ever answered higher than a '7' because an '8' would be, in my mind, like I'm missing half of my body or a limb," he recalls. On the pain scale a rating of 4 to 7 is considered moderate. Mild pain is rated 1 to 3. Over 7 is considered severe. Today, Rosette has recovered and is pain-free, but he wonders if "low balling" his pain level while in the hospital, meant he wasn't given adequate pain medication. "You realize you got less medicine and it's been eight hours and they're not allowed to give you more for a while," Rosette says. © 2018 npr

Doctors Raise Alarm About Shortages Of Pain Medications

Wade Goodwyn In hospitals around the country, anesthesiologists and other doctors are facing significant shortages of injectable opioids. These drugs, like morphine, Dilaudid and fentanyl are the mainstays of intravenous pain control and are regularly used in critical care settings like surgery, intensive care units and hospital emergency departments. The distance medical science has traveled over the last hundred years in pain management is practically miraculous. Walk into a pediatric intensive care unit at any major hospital in the country and, even though the children you'll see are critically ill from disease and surgery, you won't see any of them squirming in the bed in pain or discomfort. Though a child in this ICU may be diagnosed with an incurable disease, pediatric doctors are able to use hydromorphone, fentanyl and liquid morphine to keep the patient's suffering at a distance all the way to the end. The same is true for pain management in adults. It's not just the patient who's spared — relatives, friends, not to mention doctors, nurses and the other health care providers don't have to experience a cherished human being writhing in agony. That is why doctors across the country have grown increasingly concerned that hospitals and other medical facilities have been running low on or out of the supplies they need. Dr. Red Starks, a pediatric anesthesiologist who has been practicing for 26 years, said that for him the shortage "escalated late this spring when we didn't have any morphine." "Or one week we had morphine but we didn't have Dilaudid," he continued, "and two weeks later we'd get a little trickle of Dilaudid but we wouldn't have any morphine. And you're just thinking, 'Hello, am I in the 21st century?' " © 2018 npr

How a variation on Botox could be used to treat pain

Aimee Cunningham Painkillers crafted with a part of the wrinkle-smoothing drug Botox provide long-term pain relief in mice. Researchers added the modified Botox to molecules that target pain-messaging nerve cells. Mice given a single spinal injection of the new drugs showed signs of pain relief for the full duration of the experiments, around three weeks, researchers report online July 18 in Science Translational Medicine. Such painkillers could potentially one day be developed for humans as alternatives to more addictive drugs, such as opioids. Created by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, botulinum toxin causes the food poisoning disease botulism. Botox, which is made from the toxin, is often injected into people to iron out worry lines and has been used to treat conditions that involve overactive muscles, such as repetitive neck spasms or overactive bladder (SN: 4/5/08, p. 213). The toxin has also been used to reduce the frequency of migraines. Biochemist Bazbek Davletov of the University of Sheffield in England and colleagues focused on botulinum toxin because it can stop certain nerve cells from communicating with one another for up to five months with each injection. And “you locally inject less than a millionth of a gram, which is helpful to avoid any immune response,” he says. Davletov and colleagues created their new drugs with a process he describes as a “molecular Lego system.” Taking the part of the botulinum toxin that blocks nerve cells from sending messages, the team attached the piece to one of two molecules that target neurons that relay pain information. The researchers removed the part of the toxin, found in Botox, that binds to muscle-controlling nerve cells. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Don’t Be Afraid of Pain

By Nicholas Bakalar In a randomized clinical trial, researchers assigned 120 men and women with chronic back or neck pain to one of two treatments. The first group received the commonly recommended program of physical therapy and general exercises. The second received a program of “pain neuroscience education,” in which they learned about the function of neurons and synapses, the ways in which pain is transmitted along nerve fibers via the spinal cord to the brain, and how pain itself can modify central nervous system functions, producing pain with even the mildest stimulation. They also performed exercises, closely integrated with the education program, that gradually introduced increasingly difficult movements, concentrating on functionality rather than pain relief, and trying to continue exercising despite the pain. Treatment in both groups lasted three months, and researchers re-examined the participants at six and 12 months afterward. Compared to the controls, the neuroscience education group had higher pain thresholds, a significant reduction in disability, and improved self-reported physical and mental health. The study is in JAMA Neurology. “The main message is: Don’t be afraid of the pain,” said the lead author, Anneleen Malfliet, a doctoral candidate at the Free University of Brussels. “We know that worrying and giving attention to pain ultimately increases it. Staying active and moving is better than rest when it comes to chronic back and neck pain.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Patients With Chronic Pain Feel Caught In An Opioid Prescribing Debate

Will Stone It started with a rolled ankle during a routine training exercise. Shannon Hubbard never imagined it was the prologue to one of the most debilitating pain conditions known to exist, called complex regional pain syndrome. It's a condition that causes the nervous system to go haywire, creating pain disproportionate to the actual injury. It can also affect how the body regulates temperature and blood flow. For Hubbard, it manifested several years ago following surgery on her foot. That's a common way for it to take hold. "My leg feels like it's on fire pretty much all the time. It spreads to different parts of your body," the 47-year-old Army veteran says. Hubbard props up her leg, careful not to graze it against the kitchen table in her home east of Phoenix. It's red and swollen, still scarred from an ulcer that landed her in the hospital a few months ago. "That started as a little blister and four days later it was like the size of a baseball," she says. "They had to cut it open and then it got infected and because I have blood flow issues, it doesn't heal." She knows that soon it will happen again. "Over the past three years, I've been prescribed over sixty different medications and combinations, none have even touched the pain," she says. She holds up a plastic bag filled with discarded pill bottles — evidence of her elusive search for a solution to the pain. © 2018 npr

The Neuroscience of Pain

By Nicola Twilley On a foggy February morning in Oxford, England, I arrived at the John Radcliffe Hospital, a shiplike nineteen-seventies complex moored on a hill east of the city center, for the express purpose of being hurt. I had an appointment with a scientist named Irene Tracey, a brisk woman in her early fifties who directs Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and has become known as the Queen of Pain. “We might have a problem with you being a ginger,” she warned when we met. Redheads typically perceive pain differently from those with other hair colors; many also flinch at the use of the G-word. “I’m sorry, a lovely auburn,” she quickly said, while a doctoral student used a ruler and a purple Sharpie to draw the outline of a one-inch square on my right shin. Wearing thick rubber gloves, the student squeezed a dollop of pale-orange cream into the center of the square and delicately spread it to the edges, as if frosting a cake. The cream contained capsaicin, the chemical responsible for the burn of chili peppers. “We love capsaicin,” Tracey said. “It does two really nice things: it ramps up gradually to become quite intense, and it activates receptors in your skin that we know a lot about.” Thus anointed, I signed my disclaimer forms and was strapped into the scanning bed of a magnetic-resonance-imaging (MRI) machine. The machine was a 7-Tesla MRI, of which there are fewer than a hundred in the world. The magnetic field it generates (teslas are a unit of magnetic strength) is more than four times as powerful as that of the average hospital MRI machine, resulting in images of much greater detail. As the cryogenic units responsible for cooling the machine’s superconducting magnet clicked on and off in a syncopated rhythm, the imaging technician warned me that, once he slid me inside, I might feel dizzy, see flashing lights, or experience a metallic taste in my mouth. “I always feel like I’m turning a corner,” Tracey said. She explained that the magnetic field would instantly pull the proton in each of the octillions of hydrogen atoms in my body into alignment. Then she vanished into a control room, where a bank of screens would allow her to watch my brain as it experienced pain. © 2018 Condé Nast.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System; Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 25145 - Posted: 06.26.2018

Lawmakers In Illinois Embrace Medical Marijuana As An Opioid Alternative

Christine Herman A painkiller prescription could become a ticket for medical marijuana in Illinois. Lawmakers there passed a bill making anyone with a prescription for opioids eligible for its medical cannabis program. With this move, Illinois joins a growing number of states turning to legal cannabis in the fight against painkiller addiction. "As we see the horrible damage inflicted by opioid use and misuse, it seems like a very low-cost and low-risk alternative," says state Sen. Don Harmon, a Democrat from Oak Park, Ill., and sponsor of the Senate version of the bill. The Alternatives to Opioids Act would allow millions of patients to apply for temporary access to the state's existing medical cannabis pilot program. The bill, which passed on May 31, is now awaiting Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner's signature. Though the bill has bipartisan support, marijuana advocates have some doubts about whether he'll sign it, given his past opposition to medical cannabis. Lawmakers in several states have taken action to initiate or expand their medical marijuana programs in light of the opioid crisis. Among them, in Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed a law adding PTSD and intractable pain to the list of conditions covered in its medical marijuana program in May. And New York state Sen. George Amedore, a Republican, introduced legislation that would allow doctors to prescribe cannabis oil as an alternative to opioids for certain conditions. Under Illinois' proposed new law, anyone 21 or older with a condition for which opioids might be prescribed could get near-immediate access to cannabis products at licensed dispensaries by presenting paperwork signed by their doctor. They would no longer be fingerprinted or need criminal background checks, or wait months for approval. The measure would reduce the backlog of applications, Harmon says. © 2018 npr

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