Getting Rid of Pain :-'(

Body System: Central Nervous System - Pain and Opioid Analgesic - Dr. Bala

This is the lecture which I spent most of the time by dozing off..Zzzzzz. Even when I tried to listen back to the recorded lecture, I fell asleep after the first 15 minutes..and wake up on the next day! How sedative…! Well, he spent exactly 58 minutes and 48 seconds (how accurate is that!) talking about Pain and their Killers! (Hey, it’s not violent!)

Do you guys know that in war, whenever our soldiers were SEVERELY injured, they seem to tolerate with the pain?

This is because, they have their own inner PAIN KILLER inside their body. But, this particular assassin will not kill the pain unless they (the pain sensation) are TERRIBLE! (kire diorang tak main la kalau setakat sakit sikit). So, don’t expect that when you accidentally cut your hand, you will not feel the pain, because this painkiller acts only if the pain is extremely severe.

Who is this high class assassin? –They are – ENDOGENOUS OPIOID PEPTIDES a.k.a EOP

* to be precise, they don’t actually KILL the pain, but rather CONTROL them

Well, maybe some family history of this brutal murder, EOP?

EOP has his own followers who claimed and proud to be part of the pain mafia. They tried to be different and distinctive, with their weird names – ENDORPHIN, ENKEPHALIN, DYNORPHINE… They think it’s brutal –do you think so??

* That is why today, we can see many EOP wannabes out there in the market (should I say blackmarket?) . They are all not original, not natural…all are SYNTHETIC. But hey! They are willing to kill even minor pain! Have you heard of morphine and codeine? They are among the SYNTHETIC OPIOIDS. Just for your information, there are also semisynthetic opioids (But, we’ll just talk about them later…)

How on earth they can actually reduce and kill the pain???

Well these pain killers either synthetic or EOP, actually kills the pain with the aid of a thing call THE RECEPTOR. There are 3 types of receptors known as Mrs. Mew ( µ ), Mr. Kappa and their son called Delta. Easy to say that these special assassins (EOP and their synthetics) serve as the key to unlock these receptor so that sneak in and GET RID OF THE PAIN!

*For your information THE RECEPTOR are a good friend of G- Protein and his girlfriend, Adenylyl Cyclase. Only one person who will always feel down seeing G-Protein and Adenylyl Cyclase together, she is --> cAMP, G- Protein’ s ex- wife.

So, after they ‘unlock’ the Mew ( µ ), Mr. Kappa and Delta, what happened?

This is the difficult part – (lesson : never sleep during the lecture!). Before we know how they kill the pain, we need to have a brief idea about the thing we hated most : PAIN SENSATION !

Situation 1 : You were running down the stairs and suddenly tripped your leg and fell down about 23 flight of steps. Unluckily, your leg hit hardly on shattered glass of the broken crystal vase you were carrying.

The injured leg will actually try to share what happen with other part of your body. The first person who will receive the news is THE AFFERENT NOCICEPTOR, being a gossip girl; she will spread the news with the aid of 2 ‘radio’ channels which are Calcium channel fm and Potassium Channel fm to the SPINAL CORD who is closely related to the BRAIN. Well, when the Big Boss Brain get to know the accident, he will get mad and -- ouch! Here comes the pain sensation!

The road to the Brain from AFFERENT NOCICEPTOR is the Sensory Fiber Lane, Dorsal Horn Junction, Ascending Spinal Pathway and the Thalamus road.

So, what the painkiller did was, they unlock Mrs. Mew and her family --> and block the Calcium channel fm --> reduce the information reaching the spinal cord. They also will open more Potassium Channel fm which will make the spinal cord unable to tell the Brain what happen. If the Big Boss Brain doesn’t know, then we won’t feel the pain!

Censored : Precursor of EOP , Apo – Morphine, Activity and Selectivity of THE RECEPTOR, supraspinal & spinal analgesia, sources, physiological and pharmacological effect