Have you ever wondered why a disease or injury can create a lifetime of pain for some people but not others? Perhaps you’ve wondered why nonspecific back pain persists year after year for some patients. Well, a recently released study out of Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests there might be a neurological explanation.
This explanation would not apply to something like osteoarthritis. The chronic pain of osteoarthritis is a direct result of bone grinding on bone. As long as the condition persists, it creates pain. But what about a knee injury that imaging proves has fully healed, an injury that continues to cause pain years later?
A Broken Braking System
Researchers decided to look at various aspects of the brain and how they respond to pain signals. They zeroed in on the medullary dorsal horn, an area of the brain that appears to relay pain signals. Pain signals traveling up to the brain are carried along from the horn by projection neurons.
Under normal circumstances, researchers say that this relay station suppresses short term pain signals until they are no longer being sent. That is why you can cut your finger and it stops hurting a couple of hours later. It may take days or weeks to heal. But you stop feeling pain after a couple of hours because the medullary dorsal horn is doing its job.
Furthermore, researchers believe they may have uncovered a cause for some types of chronic pain: a broken braking system. In other words, there is some sort of malfunction within the medullary dorsal horn. The malfunction is allowing pain signals to continue on up to the brain.
Potentially Good News
The research is potentially good news to chronic pain sufferers whose pain is either nonspecific or unreasonably severe compared to the injury or illness that originally caused it. If what researchers learned proves accurate with further tests, it is possible medical science could then find a way to address the particular malfunction in question.
Imagine getting the medullary dorsal horn working properly again. A patient would experience significant pain relief without having to rely on long term pain medications. For a lot of patients, that’s huge. Plenty of patients have no interest in taking drugs for the rest of their lives.
Other Treatments Until Then
It could be a long time before any treatments based on this most recent research come to fruition. In the meantime, there are other treatments available – treatments that do not involve surgery or long-term pain medication.
Lone Star Pain Medicine is just one of many pain clinics offering such treatments. Their office in Weatherford, TX offers options like radiofrequency ablation, kyphoplasty, injection therapies, and regenerative medicine.
Their doctors explain that the treatments they offer are not typically found in a GP’s office. GPs are internists. They need to know a little bit about a lot of things. As internists, pain medicine is not a specialty. Therefore, GPs are only familiar with first line treatments.
First and Second Line
The treatments offered at most pain medicine clinics would be second- and third-line treatments. They are recommended after more conservative treatments have failed. For example, an osteoarthritis patient may not find adequate relief from a combination of physical therapy and pain medication. A pain management doctor might recommend PRP injections.
At any rate, new treatments involving the medullary dorsal horn might be in the future. A decade from now, pain medicine doctors might be offering treatments that get this natural braking system up and running again. It could mean chronic pain relief for millions.
