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A prickly pain reliever / Arlen Weinraub

An experimental herbal extract may eliminate stubborn pain with a single injection

A cactus garden near Marrakesh, Morocco. Photo: shutterstock
A cactus garden near Marrakesh, Morocco. Photo: shutterstock

Although medicine has advanced enough to treat simple headaches, tight muscles and the suffering caused by dental treatment, it has difficulty dealing with inflammatory pain, such as that caused by rheumatism, bone cancer or back injuries.

Today, drugs such as morphine and other opiates are used, which flood all the nerve cells in the body and cause dangerous side effects. More local treatments, such as steroid injections, lose their effectiveness over time. Recently, researchers began testing a toxin found in a cactus-like plant from Morocco that may provide patients with permanent local pain relief after a single injection.

 

The substance, called resiniferatoxin (RTX), relieves pain by destroying the unique nerve cells responsible for the inflammatory pain. These nerve cells are spread throughout the body (including in the skin and internal organs), extend to the spinal cord and transmit the pain signals along their axons. Eventually these pain signals reach the brain. When RTX is injected directly into the cerebrospinal fluid, it targets only certain nerve cells, which produce the TRPV1 protein that transmits the painful sensation of heat and inflammation, and kills them. The toxin does not harm healthy tissue and other nerve cells associated with pain sensation, such as those that produce tingling or pinching sensations.

The substance RTX has been tested in studies on pet dogs suffering from crippling pain, and the results are promising. Unlike rodents, dogs feel pain quite similarly to humans. "And they have personality," says Andrew Maness, chief of the Department of Operating Room Medicine at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). "We can understand how they feel in a way that is not possible working with rats."

The NIH is currently conducting a RTX trial on patients with advanced cancer. Although Manns and his colleagues can't predict when they'll have data, pain experts are watching the trial with interest. David Main, director of the Center for Interventional Pain Medicine at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, says there are other methods of killing nerve fibers that transmit pain, such as destroying nerve cells with alcohol. But these methods sometimes cause the pain to return with increased intensity and then it is much worse than in the beginning. "When we have a way to precisely target a drug and avoid other effects, we probably have a winning substance," says Main.

 

The article was published with the permission of Scientific American Israel

4 תגובות

  1. to form
    Basically you are right and a healthy person or there is
    A healer for his disease will not use this injection.
    The injection is intended to treat chronic pain,
    When the problem has already been identified, the cure is complete
    Still not found and the pain causes unnecessary suffering.

  2. flint
    You are confusing engraving with science. And what you're doing is screwing up.
    There are countless cases of unbearable pain without any illness or injury.

    Learn a little about life, okay?

  3. You really sound very reasonable, what do you propose to let the poor patients continue to suffer excruciating pain just because a cure for their disease has not yet been found? Who said that treating pain comes at the expense of finding a cure for the disease? Who said that scientists don't try to find the source of diseases? What is the connection ?

  4. Sometimes I am amazed by the ignorance and lack of common sense that prevails among the scientific community.
    A healthy body does not hurt. A sick body hurts in order to signal to us that something is wrong with it.
    Instead of listening to the pain, and bringing the body back into balance so that the pain stops,
    Looking to silence the pain.
    And then in the article they say that they know how to treat simple headaches and tight muscles!?!

    When whisperers are not strong enough, (because when we silence the pain we can continue to ignore the message it wants to convey and therefore the pain only gets stronger), they seek to destroy the nerve cells. What's the next step? An injection to the brain stem that destroys the part responsible for sensation? It will surely work.

    When will medicine start looking for the source of diseases instead of trying to treat the symptoms?

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