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Scientists Find New Painkiller From Saliva
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Nov 14, 2006 06:18 AM
from the hard-to-swallow dept.
from the hard-to-swallow dept.
dptalia writes "Scientists have found a new pain killer based on human saliva. Apparently 1 gram of the new drug provides as much pain blocking as 3 grams of morphine. The drug blocks the breakdown of the body's natural pain killing mechanism. Scientists say the molecule is simple and synthesis is expected to be simple."
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Make it stop! (Score:5, Funny)
Well wouldn't you say anything to make them stop spitting on you?
"No more, yes alright it works I'm not in pain anymore."
Moving out of cuckoo land, I have a twisted ankle after a fall yesterday should I hock a loogie onto it?
Re:Make it stop! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been on several pain management clinics/programs - the last one being pretty much on the cutting edge of medical stuff (lots of experts trained in new stuff who travel worldwide for conferences about pain management and all). I've been taking morphine several times a day for a few years for chronic pain. It sucks. The side effects suck. But it's the only thing that's given me anything close to a "quality of life".
If it helps to put things in perspective, in the last group (about 20 ppl), when asked if we had honestly thought about ending our lives to make the pain stop, nobody's answered no. Being in excruciating pain each and every second of your life is very hard. You don't get a break when you can't handle it anymore. It's almost like being tortured, and it never ever stops, until the day you die.
It's a very hard thing to live. Hard to get or keep a job too, when almost half the time you're either in too much pain to be useful for anything or taken too much morphine that you're not "all there" anymore. You can't drive when you're taking the stuff either. Half the docs out there see you as an addict or something. And there's the complications and side effects. And when things happen like you catch a cold or gastro and you vomit, then you can't keep down your morphine either, then things start to go REALLY bad. You gotta to to the hospital, and it's not like they'll just give you a shot no questions asked. Your self-esteem is at an all-time low (no work, feeling worthless and a burden, etc). You can't sleep right. It sucks. Your life sucks. If I didn't have kids to look after, I'd likely have committed suicide a couple years ago just to end the pain.
Any new pain management method is a godsend. If I could, I'd volunteer to test this stuff for free (worst case scenario, I die, and the pain ends with it).
That's the daily reality of someone dealing with chronic pain. Morphine isn't just something for addicts and getting high. It makes the lives of millions bearable and worth living. And it's not just for old folks with cancer either - I just turned 30 last month.
Parent
Re:Make it stop! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Make it stop! (Score:4, Interesting)
The real problem is diversion. A significant percentage of all prescribed opiates are diverted to the black market. There are obviously only estimates and anecdotes, but for some drugs (CR OxyCodone) I've seen numbers as high as 30%. The drugs that are diverted the most have more to do with street price than they do with the frequency of prescription. This is why CR OxyCodone is more of a problem than, say, Hydrocodone (Vicodin) or OxyCodone (Percocet).
It's the opinion of the FDA that heroin would be a nightmare of diversion problems. Furthermore, there isn't a CR form of heroin nor is there, to my knowledge, any Antagonist/Agonist combo that could help prevent diversion. Creation of such a formulary would probably increase the use of prescription heroin but it would cost a lot of money to produce and is, I'm guessing, seen as a risk by the pharma companies due to the serious stigma surrounding the drug.
In short, there's no clinical need for heroin in our current healthcare system. It's primary advantage (cost) doesn't outweigh it's many disadvantages. This is reinforced by the veritable nightmare of diversion that's plagued CR OxyCodone since it's release in the mid nineties.
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Re:Make it stop! (Score:4, Insightful)
There's an easy solution to this problem. Make opiates available on the white market.
Parent
Re:Make it stop! (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, overdoses are due to people not knowing the strength of the drug. Measured doses of pharmaceutical heroin would fix that. Drug related crime occurs because people can't afford the black market markup. Pharmaceutical morphine costs pennies a dose to manufacture.
Heroin addiction itself is actually quite benign. It is not toxic to the body, and due to tolerance maintained addicts can function quite well. There's no reason that a person being addicted to heroin should be any more notable than if they were addicted to caffeine. When they don't need to spend all day engaged in drug-seeking behavior addicts can do almost anything a sober person can, such as found Johns Hopkins University [druglibrary.org].
Parent
Re:Make it stop! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have any opiate dependency issues, I highly recommend looking into Suboxone. It's been described as a "wonder drug." One day you're an addict, doing whatever you can to scrape by, the very next day you're in recovery. No withdrawal. No pain. No suffering.
Every report I've seen is that it's recidivism rate is much lower than methadone maintenance.
Parent
Re:Make it stop! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Oh great! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Just don't try to bring any saliva to jail in your mouth, it's always the first place they look.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Good luck trying to find someone who'll shove it up your ass for you...
I hope it's psychoactive (Score:5, Funny)
I was in hospital one time after an operation and I was on a self administered morhine drip. But it would only give 1mg every 2 minutes (or whatever is the appropriate dose). But the machine also logs how many times you press the button so the staff can see how much pain you think you're in.
So I wouldn't have to count, I pressed the button every time the track changed on my mp3 player. Best hospital visit evar!!!1
I was lying there one time, opened my eyes and the Everquest HUD was there. In the chat window I was being spammed with :
You need to go to the toilet.
You need to go to the toilet.
You need to go to the toilet.
You need to go to the toilet.
Eventually I went and everybody who spoke on the journey, their chat came up in the window.
It was ace.
When they checked the machine they asked me if I was in a lot of pain, I ust said "no I like the morphine" and we all had a laugh. Until they took it off me.
Then they gave me these awful morphine based tablets and they gave me a bad trip so I stopped taking them.
No, really, an important point (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No, really, an important point (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I hope it's psychoactive (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I hope it's psychoactive (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
New Flash: Drooling idiots worth more then Google! (Score:3, Funny)
"But I was just helping Anne's neck pain..."
Saliva? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Saliva? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Going back to the old days? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a whole store of herb and animal lore that's been systematically quashed for decades (well, since the great witch hunts really), and science is only just getting round to looking at it now.
There's a lot to be said for 'complimentary' medicine for lesser ailments (although the modern pharmaceutical treatments are definitely magnitudes more effective for front line serious treatment). Rather than just decrying it, perhaps it should be investigated more thoroughly?
Re:Going back to the old days? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Going back to the old days? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Going back to the old days? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been moaning about that for years, and without exception, every pet owner and every vet considered me nuts. I noticed that if you lay a plate of food on the ground and have a dog lick it clean, a thin clear coating builds up on the surface of the plate. Give it a day or two, and washing the plate hot soapy water doesn't remove the coating as you'd think it would.
Mind you I don't know what's in saliva, and as this article suggests, few have stopped to consider the subject long enough to study it. What I do know is that the standard procedure of treating a dog for an injury or skin problem involves topical antiobiotics in combination with a cone that's placed over the dog's head (if a dog has any self respect, it's lost in minutes after the cone goes on). Licking, according to established wisdom, defeats the purpose, infects the wound or injury, saliva is full of germs, blah blah blah. Dogs have been around longer than veterinary medicine, and I doubt there's many wild animals that have membership in an HMO. Put another way, they've been doing fine for longer than we know. And for reasons we can only hope to discover. I let my own dogs lick any itches or wounds they have, and have yet to find something that hasn't healed as it should. I can't say the same for pets of relatives and friends who went the cone-head route.
I could add something on how oral sex relates to the topic at hand, but instead I'll continue with Stuff I Learned About Dogs that similarly runs contrary to a veterinary advice, established wisdom, or published literature. I expect Science will catch up to this, as it will in other areas.
1. Dogs don't need a lot of water. Unless you feed them a steady diet of dried corn meal packaged up as dog food.
2. Dogs don't need or want a steady diet, and feeding your dog "table scraps" (aka "real food") doesn't cause upset and diarrhea. By comparison, if you eat nothing but Corn Flakes every day for 10 years, chances are an ordinary hamburger will cause problems.
3. Dogs are creatures of habit, but seek out a change in regimen when possible. Don't feed your dog in a bowl. Hide the food around the house and make them search for it. Great fun. Even better, roll some soft-boiled eggs across the kitchen floor and let them catch their food. The expression on their face after that first bite is priceless.
4. If given the opportunity, dogs will discover they enjoy fruits and many vegetables (green leafy stuff being the exception, and apples and tomatoes perennial favourites). The best food for dogs is pizza. Yeah, pizza. Pizza has lots of fat (more important than protein for any active dog), it's chewy (all dogs like to chew), and if there's lots of toppings, the scavenger instinct is satisfied. Best served warm, of course.
Obviously, I have way too much free time on my hands. Maybe I can become a scientist.
Parent
Re:Going back to the old days? (Score:4, Insightful)
Make that "a whole store of vague, sometimes contradictory waffle that only intermittently produces results with absolutely no theoretical underpinnings to explain why, how or when it works".
And no-one's quashing anything - if you want to go out on the winter solstice and rub a badger on your varicose veins nobody's stopping you - just don't expect to be able to get it on the National Health Service (or private healthcare, for those countries without a functioning public healthcare system) without the slightest bit of scientific evidence that it's safe and it works.
There are a lot of advances still to be (re-)discovered in traditional herbal and animal lore around the world - of this there is no doubt. Unfortunately there's also a whole load of dangerous horseshit dressed up as traditional lore too, so as a society we don't tend to give credence to a piece of lore until it's been scientifically tested (and ideally until we have some theory as to why it works).
This isn't "quashing" or "destroying" anything - it's called being sensibly prudent. We observe an effect, study it and then use it when we're sure it's safe and effective.
Recall that most of this "store of herbal and animal lore" was discovered by feeding patients a variety of random items and watching for the ones who didn't die horribly from an infection or allergic reaction.
Parent
Well, that's another problem licked (Score:4, Funny)
Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
War on Drugs (Score:4, Funny)
Made from saliva.
Well, the "War on Drugs" is about to get interesting. Have you had you mouth drained by a government-approved suction center yet today? "Today the police knocked over another spit house..."
(I know, I know, synthesize means they don't need actual saliva... just trying to be funny.)
3 grams of morphine? (!) (Score:5, Interesting)
300 mg morphine will render just about any human being unconscious and apnoeic pretty quickly.
3000 mg will knock you out cold, stop you breathing, and drop your blood pressure precipitously, more or less instantaneously.
In which sense, numerous things have have the same pain-killing effect as three grams of morphine.
Being hit by a freight train, for instance.
Re:3 grams of morphine? (!) (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
RTFA, please. (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't even inject 3g of morphine in a rat.
What they found was that 3 grams of morphine per kg body weight is about as potent as 1 gram of morphine per kg body weight of the new saliva substance.
Parent
Hold off on the stock buying (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/06058651
Milligrams, not grams. (Score:4, Informative)
Unlikely proposition (Score:5, Interesting)
The human body's pain regulatory system is tightly bound up with a behaviour-rewarding system. Certain actions which are evolutionarily beneficial (to the species or the tribe, even if not to the individual) trigger a release of endorphins, the body's own homebrew morphine analogues which are also produced in response to pain. When an individual is not in pain, stimulation of the endorphin receptors produces a highly pleasurable sensation.
Opiates such as morphine or heroin are chemically similar enough to endorphins to bind to the same receptors. This makes them good painkillers. It also makes them good ways to induce pleasurable sensations for recreational purposes.
Beside any psychological effect (which may well be habit-forming in its own right), continued over-use of opiates can cause a reduction in the body's endorphin production. When the artificial painkillers wear off, the body is not ready with natural painkillers and so normal bodily functions produce heightened sensations -- the blood can be felt flowing through arteries, the ends of bones can be felt moving past one another, and so on. The exact manifestation of symptoms is a person-to-person variable. Most people find this state unbearable and so seek out more opiates rather than wait for the body's endorphin production to stabilise. This is physical dependence (the body cannot function normally without drugs). At £1 a breath, a heroin habit is not a cheap habit unless you are a rich rock star.
Some people have found that they can naturally produce endorphins in more than sufficient quantities to mask pain, and actually deliberately harm themselves to trigger an endorphin release. (Gripping ice cubes tightly in the hands is one of the least-dangerous ways to cause temporary pain sensations and so trigger endorphin production, and is recommended by some agencies for persistent self-harm practitioners). Others have found that by deliberately performing (what they perceive to be) altruistic acts (such as helping an old lady across the road, whether or not she actually wants to cross the road), they can stimulate endorphin production.
Unless the pain-relieving and pleasure-inducing properties of endorphins are separable, any painkiller that attempts to mimic their action will be both usable recreationally and doubly habit-forming.
Re:Those poor rats (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
You may have a conscience... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but let me assure you that mother nature doesn't.
Can you imagine the pain of being eaten by a large predator? Remember that man's evolutionary ancestors were not always at the top of the food chain; predation has certainly touched you.
Also, the venoms of poisonous animals have evolved to increase pain, allowing the predator to more effectively incapacitate the victim.
Just because mankind removes itself from the sadistic slaughter of the world does not mean that the slaughter itself abates. No matter how violent and predatory we may imagine ourselves to be, we are amateurs compared to what nature has produced.
Parent
Re:Those poor rats (Score:5, Funny)
Next up, little rat-like dogs. Can we require medical testing on those?
I'm completely against animal testing on cute little fuzzy bunnies and cool dogs, like golden retrievers. I'm against testing on some monkeys, but others you can go for it - like that little brown bastard that threw feces on me at the zoo. Give him monkey-AIDS.
Also, I never buy bug repellent that has been tested on mosquitoes. The slaughter must stop!
Parent
YES! (Score:5, Funny)
As for the small rat-like dogs, I'm afraid they're pretty much worthless even for cruel and inhumane experiments. However, you can still feed them to coyotes. Coyotes are cool dogs like golden retrievers and they eat small rat-like dogs! They go through poodles like I go through popcorn. Yay coyotes! Alligators are no good though. Sure they eat small rat-like dogs and the occasional resident from Florida but they're cold blooded and you know they're trying to bring back the dominance of the dinosaur. I suggest we genetically engineer crocodiles to have warm blood and fur. That'd show them!
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Re:YES! (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be a cat, then.
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Re:Those poor rats (Score:4, Funny)
It still might be worth it.
Parent
Re:Those poor rats (Score:4, Insightful)
However I think you will find that man's inhumanity to animals is usually pretty unimaginitive compared with mans inhumanity to man.
Generally you don't have people getting really emotional about hurting animals, not like the way they get all involved in hurting other people.
Parent
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
on the other hand, testing something so trivial as make up on an animal doesnt have any ethical justification that i can discern. then there's the sliding scale in between.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I suspect alcohol is involved, which would explain the current ghastly shades of eye makeup available for human women. Don't the researchers realize that after a few cold ones, the male rats could care less about the eye makeup?
Re:Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a friend who is a neuro-oncology researcher. A very large part of her job is: causing cancer in rats, killing those rats, and sectioning their brains. Horror may be in the eye of the beholder, but she does not practice cruelty. The rats are killed by being placed into a box with CO2 (from a dry-ice chamber). That's probably a more peaceful death than I can expect.
Granted, when you are researching pain meds, there's probably going to be pain involved. But that doesn't mean than the researchers get any pleasure out of causing this pain, or that they cause any more pain than necessary.
If you truly feel that a rat life is worth as much as a human life, or that an hour of rat pain is as bad as an hour of human pain, then it is hard to justify your continued existence. Even if you are as green as you can get, and a hard-core vegan, your ecological footprint is very large (certainly compared to a rat), and responsible for the deaths of many small animals. The fact that you use a computer means that your carbon footprint is not that of a primitive hunter-gatherer. If you eat vegetables and/or grains, you are responsible for the deaths of several small mammals (such as fieldmice) and thousands of insects every week, just from the mechanical harvesting process (even assuming that your food is 'organic' and thus pesticide-free.
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Re:Indeed (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Indeed (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're going to kill through suffocation, there are few more cruel ways than using CO2.
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Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside: I'm not against animal research, but as a former animal researcher who euthanized rodents I have to say that this is a rotten way to kill animals. CO2 euthanasia is not quick, the animals are clearly in distress (they die gasping for air, clawing at the container edges, rolling in their urine and feces). I can only imagine that CO2 has become popular because it sounds nice--you know, you put the animals to sleep with some gas that they breath all the time anyway.
Better by far is cervical dislocation--a quick snap of the neck and the animal falls senseless. Unfortunately, that practice is increasingly viewed as barbaric and is discouraged in many places. It's a strange world we live in where we care less about the actual suffering of the animal than how humane we appear to be.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Having worked in both the biotechnology and computer programming fields, I can tell you that there is not going to be a computer simulation that is good enough to obviate the need for all animal testing anytime soon. Biological systems are way too complex to accurately model. Also, there are almost always unexpected synergistic effects with new drugs. Of course, it is ridiculous to test a new hairspray on a rabbits eyes - we pretty much know what's going to
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Though many people would seem to be of the opinion that animal life is more important than human life... to them I would suggest that they put "their money where their mouth is" and feed themselves to the nearest pit-bull.
If you (not you eighty4) revere animal life as being so sacred, and consider human life to be as base as it gets, then perhaps you should attempt to remedy that situation by, as I said, feeding yourself to an animal... or is animal life only more important than human life when that human