Yes, You Can Lick Your Pain Away
A substance called Opiorphin has recently been isolated from human saliva and is believed to harness chronic and acute pain. Scientists in France believe it to be at least six times more powerful than morphine.
It’s a common fact that there is an ingredient in human saliva that is antimicrobial. It’s also known that the saliva of rodents is known to contain a nerve growth factor. But until last year, no one had ever heard of a substance in human spit that can cure chronic pain.
A group off Neuroendocrinologists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris believe that they have found an analgesic neuropeptide in human saliva similar in function to morphine. According to Dictionary.com, a neuropeptide is any of various short-chain peptides, as endorphins, that function as neuromodulators in the nervous system and as hormones in the endocrine system.
The scientists have called this neuropeptide Opiorphin, a quite fitting name as its pain-relieving action resembles opium.
According to Catherine Rougeout, one of the researchers at the Pasteur Institute in France, Opiouphin can be used as an anti-depressive. There’s more to spit than chronic pain,” Catherine Rougeot says. “It may also be an anti-depressive.”
When Catherine Rougeot at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and her colleagues injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats’ paws, 1 gram of Opiorphin per kilogram of body weight gave the same pain relief as 3 grams of morphine. More dramatically still, rats needed six times as much morphine as Opiorphin to become oblivious to the pain of other painful stimuli.
Studies on rats in France have shown that Opiorphin was able to curb pain at a much lower concentration than the powerful painkiller morphine. The researchers believe that Opiorphin works by stopping the destruction of natural opiates called enkephalins in nerve cells.
The team of researchers hope that this discovery will bring about new painkillers without the addictive effects of morphine.
It is commonly known that many alternative therapies such as acupuncture, massage therapy, chiropractic, crystal healing, Reiki, etc., can’t help all people, especially those who are have been diagnosed with severe chronic pain syndrome. Unrelenting chronic pain syndrome can affect a person for their entire life. The majority of chronic pain patients can only work and be productive if they are on daily opiates.
Quite often the drug of choice is oxycotin, a fentayl patch, or some other kind of long lasting opiate that has a long life.
We can only pray that soon there will be clinical trials on people to see Opiorphin can help chronic pain patients. As of this writing, the only research I know of is in France, and the research is on rodents. If Opriorphin can mimic the strength of morphine , it will be a godsend to the thousands, if not millions, of people who experience chronic, unbearable daily pain.
Reference:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 17979
