Holistic Dental Care by Dr. Mallory

Chili-Based Anesthetic Kills Pain, But Not Your Other Senses.
November 28, 2007, 8:20 pm
Filed under: Chili Anesthetic | Tags: , , ,

Conventional anesthetics affect all nerve cells, causing numbness or temporary paralysis, but a chemical from chili peppers may be the key to kill pain without affecting touch or movement.

The Harvard research team found a way to use an outdated variation (QX-314) of a standard anesthesia in combination with capsaicin, the chili pepper chemical that gives the pepper its distinctive hotness, to completely shut down pain, with no apparent numbness or paralysis in experiments on rats. The capsaicin penetrates cell walls of pain receptor neurons only, leaving all other nerve cells unaffected.

However dealing with pain is not as simple as just blocking neurons. Emotions, stress and psychology are all part of an enormous, highly complex jigsaw puzzle of addressing pain.