Why taking morphine, oxycodone can sometimes make pain worse | Science | AAAS

There's an unfortunate irony for people who rely on morphine, oxycodone, and other opioid painkillers: The drug that's supposed to offer you relief can actually make you more sensitive to pain over time. That effect, known as hyperalgesia, could render these medications gradually less effective for chronic pain, leading people to rely on higher and higher doses. A new study in rats—the first to look at the interaction between opioids and nerve injury for months after the pain-killing treatment was stopped—paints an especially grim picture. An opioid sets off a chain of immune signals in the spinal cord that amplifies pain rather than dulling it, even after the drug leaves the body, the researchers found. Yet drugs already under development might be able to reverse the effect.

It's no secret that powerful painkillers have a dark side. Overdose deaths from prescription opioids have roughly quadrupled over 2 decades, in near lockstep with increased prescribing. And many researchers see hyperalgesia as a part of that equation—a force that compels people to take more and more medication, while prolonging exposure to sometimes addictive drugs known to dangerously slow breathing at high doses. Separate from their pain-blocking interaction with receptors in the brain, opioids seem to reshape the nervous system to amplify pain signals, even after the original illness or injury subsides. Animals given opioids become more sensitive to pain, and people already taking opioids before a surgery tend to report more pain afterward.

More ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/why-taking-morphine-oxycodone-can-sometimes-make-pain-worse

The Itch Lab — The California Sunday Magazine

The rash, which has spread from the crook of my elbow to the base of my wrist, is starting to sprout puffy, crimson welts. It's been three minutes since I rubbed a mound of coarse blond fibers onto my forearm, and what began as a mild prickling sensation has escalated into a throbbing itch. Diana Bautista doesn't seem concerned. "Will scratching make it worse?" I ask. She nods. "Yes, but it will feel really good while you're doing it."
This unsanctioned self-experiment is taking place in the kitchenette of Bautista's University of California, Berkeley, lab. The source of my discomfort is itch powder, the kind anyone can pick up at a novelty store. Its blue packet shows a cartoon man writhing in agony. Below him, in bold letters, are the words, SURPRISE THAT SPECIAL FRIEND! "It's kind of weird people can just buy this stuff on Amazon and not know what it is," Bautista says. A professor of cell and developmental biology, she's pretty sure she knows what the ingredients are: rose-hip hairs and fiberglass. Itchy stuff for sure, but there are far more distressing things in her lab.
Bautista is one of a small but growing number of researchers in the United States trying to decode the molecular secrets of itchiness. She arrived at the specialty the way many others in her field have: by studying pain. For most of medical history, itch and pain were considered variants of the same sensation — itch being just a mild form of pain. What Bautista and others have shown is that while the two share many cellular receptors and molecules, itch has its own biological infrastructure. It's these largely unmapped internal pathways that Bautista has been working to identify for the past seven years.

More ...

https://story.californiasunday.com/itch-lab-diana-bautista?

The Sting of the Tarantula Hawk: Instantaneous, Excruciating Pain - Undark

Stung by a tarantula hawk? The advice I give in speaking engagements is to lie down and scream. The pain is so debilitating and excruciating that the victim is at risk of further injury by tripping in a hole or over an object in the path and then falling onto a cactus or into a barbed-wire fence. Such is the sting pain that almost nobody can maintain normal coordination or cognitive control to prevent accidental injury. Screaming is satisfying and helps reduce attention to the pain of the sting. Few, if any, people would be stung willingly by a tarantula hawk. I know of no examples of such bravery in the name of knowledge, for the reputation of spider wasps — specifically tarantula hawks — is well known within the biological community. All stings experienced occurred during a collector's enthusiasm in obtaining specimens and typically resulted in the stung person uttering an expletive, tossing the insect net into the air, and screaming. The pain is instantaneous, electrifying, excruciating, and totally debilitating.

The accompanying article is excerpted from Justin O. Schmidt's new book "The Sting of the Wild: The Story of the Man Who Got Stung for Science," published this spring by John's Hopkins University Press.
Howard Evans, the great naturalist and author of the classic book "Life on a Little Known Planet," was an expert on solitary wasps. Howard, a slight, reserved man with a shock of white hair and a sparkle in his eyes, was especially fond of tarantula hawks. Once, in his dedication to the investigation of these wasps, Howard netted perhaps 10 female tarantula hawks from a flower. He enthusiastically reached into the insect net to retrieve them and, undeterred after the first sting, continued, receiving several more stings, until the pain was so great he lost all of them and crawled into a ditch and just sobbed. Later, he remarked that he was too greedy.

I know of only two people who were "voluntarily" stung by tarantula hawks. I say "voluntarily" as both were performing their duties as part of documentary films, which, among other things, "encouraged" being stung. One was a young, handsome athletic entomologist who knew of the wasps. He deftly reached into the large cylindrical battery jar and grabbed a wasp by the wings. He had her in such a position that her sting harmlessly slid off his thumbnail. We prattled for a minute or so about tarantula hawks while the camera scanned close up to the long sting as it slid harmlessly, missing its mark. Then with a great heave the wasp pulled its abdomen back and thrust the sting under the nail. Yeee…ow (I can't recall if any expressions unsuitable for general audiences were uttered), the wasp was hurled into the air and flew off unharmed. One point for wasp, zero for human.

The other was a solidly built fellow who was apparently a master of performing pain-defying acts of bravery. For the film, I was charged with catching the wasp and delivering it to the scene. Five or six tarantula hawks were easily netted from flowers of an acacia tree; unfortunately, the net snagged on some thorns, and all but one wasp escaped. The remaining wasp appeared to be a male, so I summoned the cameraman to demonstrate how males cannot sting and are harmless. I reached in and casually grabbed "him." At this point, I realized that I was holding a "her." Yeee…ow, except this time it was me. I managed to toss her back in the net, while attempting to explain my blunder and pain on camera. As I was not in the film – perhaps fortunately – the footage was relegated to some obscure studio archive, perhaps someday to be resurrected on YouTube. That episode over, the tarantula hawk was delivered to the rightful actor. He grabbed her, was stung, and showed no reaction beyond a begrudging "Ouch, that did hurt a bit." I figured the guy had no nerves. But his director then handed him a habanero pepper, a tarantula hawk of chili peppers, which he enthusiastically bit into. He became instantly speechless, convinced fire was blasting from his mouth, nose, and ears. Apparently, he did have some nerves — sensitive at least to chili peppers.

How could such a small animal as a tarantula hawk be so memorable? Several years ago I attempted to address this question in a paper entitled "Venom and the Good Life in Tarantula Hawks: How to Eat, Not Be Eaten, and Live Long." The natural history of tarantula hawks provides some insights. Tarantula hawks are the largest members of the spider wasp family Pompilidae, a family some 5,000-species strong that prey solely on spiders. The feature of tarantula hawks that makes them so special is their choice of the largest of all spiders, the fierce and intimidating tarantulas, as their target prey. The old saying "you are what you eat" rings true for tarantula hawks: if you eat the largest spiders, you become the largest spider wasps. As with other spider wasps, the female wasp provides each young with only one spider that serves as breakfast, lunch, and dinner for its entire growing life.

More ...

http://undark.org/article/tarantula-hawk-wasp-sting-pain/

Treating Pain Without Feeding Addiction at ‘Ground Zero’ for Opioids - The New York Times

BRIDGEPORT, W.Va. — The doctors wanted to talk about illness, but the patients — often miners, waitresses, tree cutters and others whose jobs were punishingly physical — wanted to talk only about how much they hurt. They kept pleading for opioids like Vicodin and Percocet, the potent drugs that can help chronic pain, but have fueled an epidemic of addiction and deadly overdoses.

"We needed to talk about congestive heart failure or diabetes or out-of-control hypertension," said Dr. Sarah Chouinard, the chief medical officer at Community Care of West Virginia, which runs primary care clinics across a big rural chunk of this state. "But we struggled over the course of a visit to get patients to focus on any of those."

Worse, she said, some of the organization's doctors were prescribing too many opioids, often to people they had grown up with in the small towns where they practiced and whom they were reluctant to deny. So four years ago, Community Care tried a new approach. It hired an anesthesiologist to treat chronic pain, relieving its primary care doctors and nurse practitionersof their thorniest burden and letting them concentrate on conditions they feel more comfortable treating.

Since then, more than 3,000 of Community Care's 35,000 patients have seen the anesthesiologist, Dr. Denzil Hawkinberry, for pain management, while continuing to see their primary care providers for other health problems. Dr. Chouinard said Community Care was doing a better job of keeping them well over all, while letting Dr. Hawkinberry make all the decisions about who should be on opioid painkillers.

"I'm part F.B.I. investigator, part C.I.A. interrogator, part drill sergeant, part cheerleader," said Dr. Hawkinberry. He is also a recovering opioid addict who has experienced the difficulties of the drugs himself.

Even for people with access to the best doctors, it is hard to safely control chronic pain. Community Care is trying to do so for a disproportionately poor population, in a state that has been ground zero for opioid abuse from the very beginning of what has become a national epidemic.

Now, the difficult work of addressing the nation's overreliance on opioids, while also treating debilitating pain, is playing out on a patient-by-patient basis, including in a patchwork of experiments like this one. About 70 percent of the 1,200 patients currently in Community Care's pain management program receive opioids as part of their treatment, which may also include nonnarcotic drugs, physical therapy, injections and appointments with a psychologist.

Many had already been on opioids "for many years before they met me," Dr. Hawkinberry said, adding that his goal is to get them on lower doses, and to try other ways of managing their pain, with his own experience as a cautionary lesson.

He became addicted to the opioid fentanyl when he was an anesthesiology resident, he said, and had to wage a legal fight to stay in the program. He relapsed four years later while working at a West Virginia hospital and underwent treatment and monitoring by a state program for doctors with addiction problems. He says he has been in recovery and has not used drugs for almost nine years.

Dr. Chouinard said that Dr. Hawkinberry's experience made him "all the better positioned to know what this is like" and well-positioned to screen for drug abuse.

Patients who are prescribed opioids have to submit urine samples at each monthly appointment and at other random times, and to bring their pills to every visit to be counted. About 500 have been kicked out of the program for violations since it started in 2012.

In addition, Community Care's pain management clinic is closely monitored by the state as one of six licensed to operate under a 2012 law meant to cut down on pill mills.

The organization's primary care providers talk frequently with Dr. Hawkinberry about the patients they share with him. Because they use the same electronic medical record system, they can keep close tabs on how their patients' pain is being treated — and he on how their other health problems, like high blood pressure, are being addressed.

More ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/12/us/opioids-addiction-chronic-pain.html?

Research Grants - Migraine Research Foundation

The Migraine Research Foundation (MRF) and the Association of Migraine Disorders (AMD) announce the opening of a joint Request for Proposals for migraine research grants. MRF is committed to discovering the causes, improving the treatments, and finding a cure, and AMD stimulates increased research specifically in the area of migraine disorders. We are looking for projects that will help sufferers by advancing our ability to understand and treat migraine. As a result, we provide seed money grants for transformational projects that will lead to better treatment and quality of life for sufferers of migraine and migraine disorders.

While we welcome all proposals relevant to basic or clinical migraine research, we are particularly interested in translational projects and those related to migraine variants, childhood migraine, and chronic migraine.

https://migraineresearchfoundation.org/for-researchers/rfp-and-grant-application/

What Does Genetics Tell Us About Chronic Pain? - Relief: Pain Research News, Insights And Ideas

When the pain comes, Alina Delp retreats to air conditioning as soon as possible. What begins to feel like a mild sunburn will, if left unattended, turn into a raging, burning pain.

"It's this turbulent, violent sensation that feels electric and stinging," Delp says, describing the pain at its worst. "I've run out of the building screaming like a lunatic before because it's been so bad."

Delp has erythromelalgia, a rare condition in which a person's body (typically the feet and the hands, though Delp experiences pain all over) reacts to mild warmth as though it is on fire. Mild exertion, even just standing, will set it off for Delp, which meant quitting her job of 15 years as a flight attendant. Two years of countless doctors' appointments finally got her a diagnosis in 2012, but current medications are unable to relieve pain in most patients.

"I'm pretty much a prisoner in my own home," she says. Her house in Tacoma, Washington, is kept at a chilly 58 degrees Fahrenheit, thanks to some special duct work that her husband, coincidentally in the heating and cooling business, was able to arrange. Delp spends most of her time reading, watching TV, or working on her computer to maintain an online erythromelalgia support group that she co-founded.

But, this horrific condition has handed pain researchers their most promising drug target in years. In 2004, a study of an inherited version of erythromelalgia pinpointed a mutation in a gene that directs the making of a sodium channel, called Nav1.7; sodium channels are proteins that help control the electrical excitability of neurons.

"The channel sets the sensitivity of pain-signaling neurons, and when you have those Nav1.7 mutations, the neurons fire when they shouldn't," says Stephen Waxman of Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, US, and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, West Haven, Connecticut. Waxman was the first to study the effects of Nav1.7 mutations in neurons.

Delp doesn't know if she has this type of mutation, but medicines that calm the channel may still give her relief. Multiple clinical trials are underway to test Nav1.7 channel blockers, not only in inherited erythromelalgia, but in more common conditions, like sciatica and trigeminal neuralgia, which both involve intense shooting pain in different parts of the body.

More ...

http://relief.news/genetics-tell-us-chronic-pain/

'You want a description of hell?' OxyContin's 12-hour problem - Los Angeles Times

The drugmaker Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin two decades ago with a bold marketing claim: One dose relieves pain for 12 hours, more than twice as long as generic medications.

Patients would no longer have to wake up in the middle of the night to take their pills, Purdue told doctors. One OxyContin tablet in the morning and one before bed would provide "smooth and sustained pain control all day and all night."

On the strength of that promise, OxyContin became America's bestselling painkiller, and Purdue reaped $31 billion in revenue.

But OxyContin's stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The drug wears off hours early in many people, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. OxyContin is a chemical cousin of heroin, and when it doesn't last, patients can experience excruciating symptoms of withdrawal, including an intense craving for the drug.

The problem offers new insight into why so many people have become addicted to OxyContin, one of the most abused pharmaceuticals in U.S. history.

The Times investigation, based on thousands of pages of confidential Purdue documents and other records, found that:

• Purdue has known about the problem for decades. Even before OxyContin went on the market, clinical trials showed many patients weren't getting 12 hours of relief. Since the drug's debut in 1996, the company has been confronted with additional evidence, including complaints from doctors, reports from its own sales reps and independent research.
• The company has held fast to the claim of 12-hour relief, in part to protect its revenue. OxyContin's market dominance and its high price — up to hundreds of dollars per bottle — hinge on its 12-hour duration. Without that, it offers little advantage over less expensive painkillers.
• When many doctors began prescribing OxyContin at shorter intervals in the late 1990s, Purdue executives mobilized hundreds of sales reps to "refocus" physicians on 12-hour dosing. Anything shorter "needs to be nipped in the bud. NOW!!" one manager wrote to her staff.
• Purdue tells doctors to prescribe stronger doses, not more frequent ones, when patients complain that OxyContin doesn't last 12 hours. That approach creates risks of its own. Research shows that the more potent the dose of an opioid such as OxyContin, the greater the possibility of overdose and death.
• More than half of long-term OxyContin users are on doses that public health officials consider dangerously high, according to an analysis of nationwide prescription data conducted for The Times.

Over the last 20 years, more than 7 million Americans have abused OxyContin, according to the federal government's National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The drug is widely blamed for setting off the nation's prescription opioid epidemic, which has claimed more than 190,000 lives from overdoses involving OxyContin and other painkillers since 1999.

The internal Purdue documents reviewed by The Times come from court cases and government investigations and include many records sealed by the courts. They span three decades, from the conception of OxyContin in the mid-1980s to 2011, and include emails, memos, meeting minutes and sales reports, as well as sworn testimony by executives, sales reps and other employees.

The documents provide a detailed picture of the development and marketing of OxyContin, how Purdue executives responded to complaints that its effects wear off early, and their fears about the financial impact of any departure from 12-hour dosing.

Reporters also examined Food and Drug Administration records, Patent Office files and medical journal articles, and interviewed experts in pain treatment, addiction medicine and pharmacology.

More ...

http://static.latimes.com/oxycontin-part1/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

Scientists Have Been Using a Flawed Method to Diagnose Pain - Gizmodo

For many years, neuroscientists believed they had identified a specific pattern of brain activity acting as a kind of "signature" for pain in the brain. Recently this so-called "pain matrix" has been called into question, and a new study by British researchers may have shattered the myth once and for all.

The pain matrix is actually a cluster of regions in the brain that prior imaging studies indicated are involved in processing pain perception, including the posterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. This has been so broadly accepted that the signature pattern has been used to declare that emotional pain (like social rejection) and physical pain are the same thing, as far as the brain is concerned. The argument goes that something like a bad romantic breakup has the same effect on brain activity as spilling a hot cup of coffee on your shirt.

More recent studies have cast doubt on those conclusions, however. And now researchers at the University of Reading and University College London have concluded that this cluster of regions in brain is not specific to pain. It also responds to loud noises, bright lights, a strong non-painful touch (like a firm handshake), and yes, social rejection. They describe their findings in a new paper published today in JAMA Neurology.

"I wouldn't say that's it's wrong to say that the 'pain matrix' is involved in processing pain," lead author Tim Salomons (University of Reading) told Gizmodo. "What's wrong is the idea that it is specific to pain—in other words, that when you observe this pattern, you can just assume that person is in pain."

Most of these studies employ functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Unlike conventional medical MRI, which creates a static image of the brain similar to an x-ray, fMRI monitors the brain in action. When enough neurons fire together in response to a given stimulus, blood flow increases to those parts of the brain involved in processing that input. The fMRI detects this as slight increases in blood oxygen levels—the so-called BOLD response–in those different regions. The resulting gorgeous full-color images make for terrific eye candy, but they aren't actually real-time snapshots of the brain in action; rather, they're visualizations of statistical data.

So how can scientists know for sure if the pattern they're seeing is really an indicator for pain (or any other type of cognitive process)? The gold standard is cognitive neuroscience studies that involve patients with existing brain damage, according to Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved with the study. So if you want to prove that a particular cluster of brain regions encodes pain, you must first determine that patients with damage to those regions can no longer feel pain.

More ...

http://gizmodo.com/new-study-casts-more-doubt-on-notion-of-the-brains-pain-1772653232?

Mind over back pain - Harvard Health Blog

To the surprise of doctors and patients alike, accumulating research suggests that most chronic back pain isn't actually the result of illness or injury. Study after study indicates instead that back pain is very often caused by our thoughts, feelings, and resulting behaviors. And an exciting new study now demonstrates that treatments aimed at our beliefs and attitudes can really help.

When our back hurts, it's only natural to assume that we've suffered an injury or have a disease. After all, most pain works this way. When we cut our finger, we see blood and feel pain. When our throat hurts, it's usually because of an infection.

But back pain is different. There simply isn't a close connection between the condition of the spine and whether or not people experience pain. Research has shown that a majority of people who have never had any significant back pain have the very same "abnormalities" (such as bulging or herniated spinal discs) that are frequently blamed for chronic back conditions. And then there are the millions of people with severe chronic back pain who show no structural abnormalities in their back at all.

On top of this, it turns out that people in developing countries, who do back-breaking labor and don't have easy access to medical treatment, have much fewer incidents of chronic back pain than people in the developed world who sit in ergonomically designed chairs, sleep on fancy mattresses, and have ready access to spinal imaging, surgery, and medications.

Because there's so little correlation between the condition of the spine and any given person's experience with back pain, clinicians and researchers have begun looking instead at treatments that address the psychological and behavioral patterns that can lock people into years of suffering. And they've just demonstrated that two of these treatments work much better than traditional medical interventions alone.

More ...

http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/mind-back-pain-201605049517

F.D.A. Again Reviews Mandatory Training for Painkiller Prescribers - The New York Times

A pain management specialist, Dr. Nathaniel Katz, was stunned in 2012 when the Food and Drug Administration rejected a recommendation from an expert panel that had urged mandatory training for doctors who prescribed powerful painkillers like OxyContin.

That panel had concluded that the training might help stem the epidemic of overdose deaths involving prescription narcotics, or opioids. At first, Dr. Katz, who had been on the panel, thought that drug makers had pressured the F.D.A. to kill the proposal. Then an agency official told him that another group had fought the recommendation: the American Medical Association, the nation's largest doctors organization.

"I was shocked," said Dr. Katz, the president of Analgesic Solutions, a company in Natick, Mass. "You go to medical school to help public health and here we have an area where you have 15,000 people a year dying."

Now, as the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal and state agencies scramble to find solutions to the vexing opioid problem, the role of doctors is coming back to center stage. The Obama administration recently announced that it supported mandatory training for prescribers of opioids.

On Tuesday, a new F.D.A. panel of outside experts will meet to review once again whether such training should be required. The hearing will almost certainly touch off an intense debate inside the medical community and focus attention on medical groups like the A.M.A., which have resisted governmental mandates affecting how doctors practice for both ideological and practical reasons. The panel is expected to make its final recommendation on Wednesday. An F.D.A. spokeswoman said the agency now supported mandatory training.

More ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/business/fda-again-reviews-mandatory-training-for-painkiller-prescribers.html?

Unlike sex and violence, childbirth is rarely depicted in literary fiction - Slate

Are there any taboo subjects left in literature? Graphic violence and sex in any of its endless variations have become mainstream. Even excretion is now explicit: Think of the unforgettable scene of Joey searching for a ring in his own shit in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. But read almost any novel in which childbirth, one of the most universal of human events, takes place, and you will find that the actual act has been deleted. An author as celebrated for her visceral and detailed accounts of female experience as Elena Ferrante offers the following as a description, in full, of the birth of the narrator's first child in the third book of the Neapolitan novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay:

I had atrocious labor pains, but they didn't last long. When the baby emerged and I saw her . . . I felt a physical pleasure so piercing that I still know no other pleasure that compares to it.

Pages later, the birth of her second child gets even less elaboration: "Everything went smoothly. The pain was excruciating, but in a few hours I had another girl."

Certain ways of avoiding a childbirth scene in contemporary fiction have become almost predictable, as clichéd as the clothes scattered on the floor in a movie rated PG-13: the frantic car ride to the hospital, followed by a jump cut to the new baby; or the played-for-laughs episode of the laboring woman screaming at her clueless husband, followed by a jump cut to the new baby. What happened to what actually happens?

My latest novel, Eleven Hours, takes place entirely during one labor and delivery in an urban hospital. I've been through childbirth twice myself, and found it the most physically painful and most transformative experience of my life. I wanted to write something I felt I hadn't read: a story that described childbirth from the inside. I wanted to depict the alterations of consciousness that come from the confrontation with great pain, and the ways in which the crisis of labor can cause a woman to find in herself previously unknown strengths. I wanted to conjure up the feeling of long waiting punctuated by intense activity. I wanted to show what it felt like to be so very close, simultaneously, to the creation of life and the possibility of death.

When Eleven Hours had been accepted for publication in the U.S. and my agent was shopping it abroad, a publisher that had taken one of my earlier books turned it down. "Sales and marketing did not feel confident they would know how to pitch it," I was told. "It's such a specific experience recounted here."

Such a specific experience? You mean, one that billions of women have been through? Did not feel confident they would know to pitch it? The novel, as I saw it, was about the severe challenge to mind and body that childbirth is for a woman, just as combat is a severe challenge to the minds and bodies of men. Would any publisher ever claim that they wouldn't know how to pitch a war narrative?

More ...

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/05/unlike_sex_and_violence_childbirth_is_rarely_depicted_in_literary_fiction.html?

Mindfulness Effective for Chronic Low Back Pain in Clinical Trial | Pain Research Forum

Government officials, physicians, and the public are increasingly aware of a need to move away from using opiate drugs to treat chronic pain. More and more, doctors are searching for ways to help patients manage pain with non-pharmacological interventions. In line with this trend, new findings now support the use of mindfulness to treat chronic low back pain.

In a clinical trial published March 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), subjects who underwent mindfulness training for eight weeks were more likely to report improvements in pain, lasting up to a year, compared to people who received whatever other care they chose. The study was led by Daniel Cherkin, Group Health Research Institute, Seattle, US, and Judith Turner, University of Washington, also in Seattle.

A second study, published March 16 in the Journal of Neuroscience and led by Fadel Zeidan, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, US, and Robert Coghill, now at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, Ohio, US, hints at how mindfulness might reduce pain. The researchers showed in healthy subjects that meditation reduced acute pain independent of endogenous opioids, which account for the vast majority of other brain-based manipulations—such as the placebo effect or conditioned pain modulation.

More ...

http://www.painresearchforum.org/news/66166-mindfulness-effective-chronic-low-back-pain-clinical-trial