Pain management techniques

Posted on 18 March 2015

The quest to relieve pain is as old as the human race. Thanks to modern pain management techniques, we’re very close to eliminating pain altogether.

Experiencing pain is the body’s way of telling us in no uncertain terms that something, somewhere, is wrong. Many of us feel sore or achy at some point. To address – and alleviate – the source of the pain, we simply pop a pill and wait 20 minutes for it to take effect. But how did we manage pain before we could self-medicate with over-the-counter painkillers?

Then…
Between the Stone Age (before 2000BC) and the Middle Ages (between the 5th and the 15th century), pain management was a bit hit and miss. It was commonly thought that pain was a punishment inflicted on the sufferer by angry gods and evil spirits. The remedy? Magic rites, prayers, ritual sacrifices, offerings and the use of a variety of noise-making instruments to frighten the spirits out of the sufferer’s body.

There’s evidence that the ancient Egyptians treated those afflicted by chronic pain by laying electric Nile eels onto the wound as a kind of nerve stimulus – not unlike today’s transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS).

By the 1600s, traditional healers’ herbs and poultices had evolved into more effective pain relievers. Think morphine, opium, laudanum, aspirin, codeine – powerful painkillers that, with time and use, provided effective relief, but with one alarming side effect. Addiction. By the mid-1800s, substance dependency was at an all-time high. At the same time (around 1846), surgeons were using chloroform and ether as anaesthetics, instead of getting their patients to bite down on leather straps while they sliced away at speed.

Now…
By the 1900s, the use of opium had been banned in a number of countries but tireless research in the field of pharmaceuticals saw the introduction of a variety of synthetic opiates that were only available on prescription. A huge number of oral painkillers became available over-the-counter in a bid for pain sufferers to self-medicate.

For those with chronic pain or terminal diseases, patient controlled analgesia (PCA) that was widely used to treat post-surgical pain was introduced in the late 1980s. That meant a person could control their pain-relief medication dosage and frequency as they wished, via an intravenous infusion pump.

The 1990s saw the launch of the transdermal pain management patch – almost like a painkiller-infused plaster – which allows pain-relieving medication to be absorbed into the bloodstream via contact with the skin.

The new millennium saw major breakthroughs in pain management techniques as scientists discovered how to alleviate pain either by stopping the messages from being sent or preventing the brain from understanding the pain message. These techniques include nerve blocking injections, epidural and intrathecal injections, as well as the use of heat, radiotherapy, and spinal cord and deep brain stimulation.

Fun facts
120 million adults – 20% of the world’s population – suffer from pain daily.

Every year, one in 10 adults worldwide is diagnosed with some form of chronic pain. That’s roughly 60 million people!

On a global scale, one in every five adults deals with moderate to severe chronic pain of some kind on a daily basis.

US$50-billion is the value of the pain management pharmaceuticals market worldwide in 2013. It was expected to grow by 10% at the end of 2014.

US$92,9-billion is the estimated 2015 global market value of over-the-counter (OTC) medications.

The information provided in this article was correct at the time of publishing. At Mediclinic we endeavour to provide our patients and readers with accurate and reliable information, which is why we continually review and update our content. However, due to the dynamic nature of clinical information and medicine, some information may from time to time become outdated prior to revision.