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Pain and Painkillers Essay

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In this discussion, I will be looking at the different forms of pain and how this pain is caused within the body. The number of different types of drugs used to treat pain is forever expanding but I will examine the main types of painkiller, how they were discovered and how they work to relieve the symptoms of pain.
There are many different types of pain which can be categorised depending on how the pain is caused and how long the pain lasts. If pain results from tissue damage then it is called nociceptive pain and this includes pain from pressure applied outside of the body, like a cut or a burn, or from pressure inside the body such as a tumour. Another type of pain is neuropathic pain which is pain experienced when there is damage to …show more content…

These pain relievers are small polypeptide chains made in the brain and are also responsible for the feelings of euphoria encountered when you eat spicy food or after exercise. Opioid drugs mimic the action of these peptide chains, however some enkephalins are a thousand times as effective as drugs such as morphine. Because of this, chemists are trying to synthesise new drugs based on the enkephalins but their duration of analgesic action is short as they can be easily hydrolysed in the body by the enzyme peptidase2.3,10.

Other methods to reduce pain have been around for thousands of years. Hippocrates was the first man to advise people to chew on willow bark as a form of pain relief. However, it was not until 1763 that Edward Stone, an English clergyman, noticed that another property of willow bark was to reduce fever3. Almost one hundred years later in 1860, a compound called salicin was extracted from the willow bark and found to be the reason the bark could provide pain relief. This salicin was hydrolyzed to glucose and salicyl alcohol, which could then be oxidised to salicylic acid4. The bulk of salicylic acid is now produced using the Kolbe synthesis method which is a process that rearranges sodium phenyl carbonate. This chemical is obtained by heating dry sodium phenate under pressure with carbon dioxide, the sodium salt is then decomposed to the acid by dilute hydrochloric acid5 (see figure 1). Derivatives of salicylic

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