Website Design and Online Promotion

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Website Design and Creation. Online Promotion and Website Marketing

Pain Treatment recommends Neil Hill Projects for  website design and website creation. With over 30 years internet experience they will ensure that your web presence is alive and well.

Neil Hill Projects has 30 years experience incomputing and managing online and web based projects. We work closely with our clients and ensure reliability, affordability, and confidentiality, all delivered to you in an ethical, no-nonsense package that everyone can understand.  We have a successful presence in New South Wales, Queensland and internationally, with a well established network of partners and resources.

 Read more: Online and Web Project Management, Website Design and Website Creation, Website Marketing and Online Promotion

Death by opioid aviodable. A priorty for pain medics.

Pain Treatment

Interesting article about aviodable deaths when opioid used as pain treatment.  Full Article @   http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/w-pao060911.php 

Risky behavior, psychiatric disorders, substance abuse contribute to opioid overdose

Deaths related to prescription opioid therapy are under intense scrutiny, prompting those in pain medicine—clinicians, patient advocates, and regulators—to understand the causes behind avoidable mortality in legitimately treated patients. Studies reporting on statistics, causes, and adverse events involving opioid treatment are now available in a special supplement of Pain Medicine, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM).
Opioids are prescribed to treat moderate to severe pain and include extended-release opioid analgesic drugs such as methadone, morphine, and oxycodone. According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 29 million Americans age 12 and older misused extended-release and long-acting opioids in 2002 climbing to more than 33 million in 2007. The FDA also estimates that opioids were responsible for nearly 50,000 emergency room visits in 2006.
"Preventing unnecessary deaths from opioid therapy should be a central focus for everyone working in the field of pain medicine," said Lynn R. Webster, MD, FACPM, FASAM, Medical Director and Founder of Lifetree Clinical Research and Pain Clinic in Salt Lake City, Utah, and officer for the AAPM. "Our primary objective is to increase understanding of the major risk factors associated with opioid-related deaths and exploring methods that mitigate the adverse effects involved in treating patients with analgesics that are potentially lethal."
One study in the Pain Medicine supplement on opioid mortality reports on the findings of epidemiologists at the Utah Department of Health (UDOH) who examined medication-related harm starting in 2004. The research team, led by Christina A. Porucznik, PhD, MSPH, of the Division of Public Health at the University of Utah analyzed several data sources including vital statistics, medical examiner records, emergency department diagnoses, and the state prescription registry. "Our analysis showed that prescription drug-related harm, including death, in Utah primarily involved opioids," commented Dr. Porucznik. "Additional studies are needed to indentify risky prescribing patterns and individual-level risk factors which contribute to opioid-related injury or death."
Read more at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/w-pao060911.php

Pain Treatment for Prostate Condition

Pain Relief from prostate condition.
               
An experimental treatment is being used to helf with the pain associated with prostate conditions. Urology professor Curtis Nickel leads a study into chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain in men and find that treatment with a selective alpha blocker may relieve symptoms and improve quality of life.
'New findings show that treatment with a specific alpha blocker helps reduce symptoms and improve quality of life for men with chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS).

The alpha-blocker, known as silodosin, works by selectively relaxing the muscles in the bladder neck and prostate. The treatment is already approved in Canada, the United States, the EU and Japan to treat painful symptoms of another prostate gland condition, benign prostatic hyperplasia, commonly referred to as an enlarged prostate.

Despite being the most common form of prostatitis, CP/CPPS is the most misunderstood and difficult to treat because the symptoms are very similar to other conditions and requires a significant degree of testing and screening to identify.

"Antibiotics are commonly used as a treatment, but are not typically effective, probably because CP/CPPS does not seem to be caused by a bacterial infection," explains lead researcher Curtis Nickel, a professor in the Department of Urology, practicing urologist at Kingston General Hospital, and Canada Research Chair in Urologic Pain and Inflammation.

CP/CPPS is a debilitating condition characterized by persistent discomfort in the lower pelvic area including the bladder area, testicles, and penis. Symptoms can be severe and include painful and frequent urination and difficult or painful ejaculation. The cause of the condition is unknown.

In Dr. Nickel's study, approximately 60 per cent of men reported feeling better after treatment with silodosin versus 30 per cent of participants who were given a placebo. The number of patients who reported feeling better is higher than in a similar study he ran several years ago that tested the effects of a different alpha blocker.

Dr. Nickel, along with his Prostatitis Research Group at Kingston General Hospital and Queen's University, has been studying CP/CPPS for the past two decades. He has been the principal investigator of over a dozen international clinical trials evaluating therapies for chronic prostatitis. His research studies are supported by the Canadian Institute of Health Research, US National Institutes of Health and industry, including Watson Pharmaceuticals who provided the support for this particular clinical trial.

Dr. Nickel presented his results at today's American Urological Association annual meeting in Washington DC. The study results will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Urology.

Things to do when you dislocate your shoulder.

Dislocated Shoulder Treatment

Here is an article about things to do with a dislocated shoulder.  Info Sports Injury Blog

What should you do when you suffer a dislocated shoulder?
Firstly you should prevent further damage by protecting the shoulder joint eg using a sling.  Get to a trained medical professional so that it can be put back in (reduced).  Don’t try and put it back in by yourself as you can... read more what to do with a dislocated shoulder

Pain Clinic Open-Sydney-Back Treatments

Longy Nguyen has opened a new pain clinic in Sydney.  For more than forty years Longy has been treating people from around the world for back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain and many other common injuries. Read more about Longys Pain Clinic and a back treatment for an NRL captain.

Cannabis may be able to Kill the Pain without getting 'stoned'.

Cannabis to Stop the Pain

Great if it could get rib of that pain.  Here is a great article that may lead the way to using the recreational drug cannabis for pain treatment.

By Andy Coghlan April 2011

An ingenious set of experiments has teased apart the mind-altering and pain-relieving effects of the main component of cannabis. This could open the way to cannabis-like drugs that provide pain relief without causing unwanted highs.

Cannabis is taken as a painkiller – to dull pain in cancer for example – but it can produce unpleasant side effects such as hallucinations and impaired mobility.

Now, a team led by Li Zhang of the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Maryland, has shown that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the active component in cannabis that makes people high but that is also thought to dull pain – binds to different molecular targets on cells to produce these two effects.

It has long been known that THC gives people a high by binding to a molecular anchor on cells called the cannabinoid type-1 (CB1) receptor. Zhang and his team discovered that THC relieves pain by binding instead to receptors for the brain-signalling compound glycine and increasing their activity.

Through experiments on mice, they then confirmed that if the glycine receptor is absent or if its activity is blocked by another drug, the animals experienced pain in a standard "tail-flick" test even when given THC, confirming that the drug's pain-relief and psychotropic effects can be decoupled.

Target receptor

"We found that this glycine receptor could be a primary target for developing non-psychoactive forms of cannabis," says Lhang.

"This is an important breakthrough in the long-sought separation of intoxicant effects of THC from its desired medical effects," says Les Iversen at the University of Oxford in the UK, who studies the effects of marijuana.

However, Stephen Wright, director of research and development for GW Pharmaceuticals in Porton Down, UK, thinks that there are other ways that cannabis-based medicines may be able to provide pain relief without the side effects. Last year the firm launched a cannabis-based medicine in Europe called Sativex to dampen painful muscle spasms in patients with multiple sclerosis.

Wright says that no persistent psychotic effects have been seen with the product, partly because it is released into the body 20 to 40 times more slowly than THC is released when cannabis is smoked. As well as THC, GW's preparation contains cannabidiol, a component of marijuana thought to dampen psychotic reactions to THC.

No psychotic effects been seen in the US, where Sativex is being trialled to combat pain in cancer patients.

Canadian Medical Association Journal

 

Meditation used to help with pain.

Meditation as a Pain Treatment.

Part 2 of an excellent article.

By MyHealthNewsDaily staff writer Amanda Chan 

"According to the researchers, 15 healthy volunteers were subjected to painful heat for five minutes from a device attached to their leg while they underwent arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging, a type of brain scan that shows long durations of brain processes.

The scans revealed high activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, a brain region that determines the source and severity of pain.

Then the volunteers attended four 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique called focused attention, which trained them to focus on breathing and to dismiss other thoughts or emotions.

After the meditation training, the study participants were again subjected to the painful heat on their leg while undergoing the brain scans. The scans revealed a decrease in activity in the primary somatosensory cortex and an increase in the activity in three regions that shape how the body experiences pain: the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula and the orbito-frontal cortex.

The ratings that the study participants assigned to the pain decreased 40 percent after they attended the meditation training sessions.

Acute pain and chronic pain

The findings show that meditation affects multiple regions in the brain to relieve pain sensations, said Alex Zautra, a psychology professor at Arizona State University who was not involved with the study.

Changes in breathing rate or heart function didn't account for the differences in pain ratings from before the meditation training to after it, so "changes in attention deployment made possible through training in mindfulness appear to have been the primary mechanism here," Zautra told MyHealthNewsDaily.

People at highest risk for acute pain, including firefighters, police officers and members of the military, stand to benefit the most from these studies, he said.

However, further study is needed before meditation is encouraged as a primary solution for chronic pain, Zautra said. 

Some people with chronic pain, like those who have fibromyalgia, may need additional treatment beyond meditation to soothe symptoms, he said.

Zautra authored a study, published last year in the journal Pain, that showed that breathing exercises could decrease pain sensations in healthy women. However, the results were mixed for women with fibromyalgia; only the women who had positive outlooks on life reported decreased pain sensations, his study showed.

Pass it on: Brain scans reveal that meditation can reduce sensations of pain.

Follow MyHealthNewsDaily staff writer Amanda Chan on Twitter @AmandaLChan.