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Body Produces Potent Painkillers
Opiorphin, a natural painkiller produced by the human body, is far more powerful than morphine, according to French researchers.
The BBC reported that researchers found that the chemical was effective at low doses in killing pain in rats, leading to speculation that it could be used in pain treatment among humans. Lead researcher Catherine Rougeot and colleagues at the Institut Pasteur in Paris speculated that opiorphin prevents the destruction of enkephalins, which modify pain responses.¤
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Can 'Magic' Mushrooms Help Headache Sufferers?
A growing number of cluster-headache sufferers are using psychedelic mushrooms to lessen their pain.
Users like Bob Wold, who brews a mushroom tea to get a small dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, say it is the only drug that words against his headaches. And Harvard Medical School researchers are studying whether psilocybin and LSD have legitimate medical uses.
Wold, 53, began getting up to six cluster headaches a day ... » »
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... a day about 25 years ago. "The pain is similar to if you hit your thumb with a hammer," he said. Wold tried an estimated 75 legal drugs to combat the pain, without success.
But after talking to a recreational LSD user who said the drug made his cluster headaches disappear, Wold decided to try psilocybin. He says that drinking the mushroom-based tea twice a year has worked wonders. "For the past five years, I've been pretty much pain-free and headache-free," he said.
A support group formed by Wold, ClusterBusters, now promotes research on psychedelics. Meanwhile, Harvard researchers have found that 25 of 48 psilocybin users studied said the drug prevented their cluster headaches, and 7 or 8 LSD users said the same. "No other medication, to our knowledge, has been reported to terminate a cluster period," the researchers wrote in the June 27, 2006 issue of the journal Neurology.
Harvard researcher Dr. John Halpern said more study is needed to determine why the drugs appear to work, and advised that headache suffers "not self-medicate but to respect our laws and to help us properly and safely conduct the research needed to find out if these substances work for real."¤
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