How Does Your Brain Fight Pain???
Pain & Your Body
Pain and how to deal with it is always a big topic in this day and age. I'd say mainly because we have not been given the skills on how to naturally help ourselves. Our doctors usually will tell us to go consume some sort of drugs. And, maybe we even think ourselves to just go and take a pill. The issue here is that all we are doing is blocking out what our body is actually feeling. In the end, I'm not sure how this is helping with safely and productively deal with what is happening to our bodies.
New Research on Pain
A trigger stimulates pain, that is usually a given. But, pain is still possible to be felt without a trigger. With or without a trigger, pain is often influenced by your emotional state. Fear, anxiety, and sadness can all make pain worse.
Our pain transmission system can be hypersensitive in the mist of injury and go haywire/stay in a sensitized state long after the injury has healed. This pain can be termed a disease, caused by a nervous system that is malfunctioning. Neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome are all examples of this.
Scientists are currently researching ways to activate the brain's internal abilities to control pain and decrease the suffering that is associated with it.
A study in Britain had three groups of people with shoulder pain. Group A underwent surgery. Group B was led to believe they had the surgery. Group C was asked to come back in three months to meet with a shoulder specialist. Two groups reported similar pain relief in their shoulder, groups A and B. What this showed is that the surgery isn't actually doing anything, it was a placebo.
Virtual reality is proving to help with pain. Virtual reality goggles have been tested and proved, in the lab of Luana Colloca, to help people achieve a higher state of pain tolerance. There is lack of information as to why this is happening.
Recently there have been studies on people who don't feel pain. This has helped discover the protein Nav1.7. "The protein, christened Nav1.7, sits on the surface of the neuron and serves as a channel for sodium ions to pass into the cell which enables electrical impulses constituting the pain signal to propagate along the threadlike axon that connects to another neuron in the spinal cord".
This new discovery that Nav1.7 can open or close the gates to pain has made a target for researchers to create pain medications that don't have the risk of addiction.
Resource for the above and quote taken from "A World of Pain" by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic Jan 2020
How the Brain Fights Pain...
