For a long time, opioids and other medications were our best weapon against pain. Unfortunately, their effectiveness at providing relief came at a steep price—skyrocketing numbers of addicted patients. Over 130 people die every day of opioid overdoses, and still more abuse opioid medications. For many people with chronic pain, simply discontinuing their medication wasn't an option. This left doctors and researchers alike wrestling with a serious problem: How do you provide pain relief, without gambling their patients' lives on addiction?
Some care providers weaned their patients off of opioids in the hopes that they could continue without them. Others switched to less dangerous and addictive medications. Still others attempted complementary approaches, like acupuncture, aromatherapy, or mindfulness techniques. While these work for some patients, everyone's pain is different and not all sufferers respond the same way. There's still a need for measures that can provide quick, effective relief for most types of severe pain.
That's where technology comes in.
To really see how technology can relieve pain, it's important to remember what pain is. When something's wrong, either an illness or an injury, the body picks up on the stimulus and sends signals along nerves to the brain. This presents several opportunities for intervening in this process, including at the level of nerves, and within the brain itself. It's not strictly necessary to use medication to do this, either—scientists have gotten great results disrupting the pain process using tech.
Neuromodulation is the process of altering the way nerves work, through targeting some kind of stimulus to a specific point in the body. One example is a spinal cord stimulation device. which sends low-voltage electrical impulses to the spine. This disrupts the pain signals sent to the brain, providing relief.
When it comes to changing how the brain itself perceives pain, distraction is an important tool. It's also something pediatricians have known about for decades, distracting their young patients from the poke of a vaccine. When it comes to helping adults cope with pain, things aren't much different—virtual reality can provide an immersive environment that keeps the brain too occupied to perceive pain with the same intensity that it otherwise would.
At the injury level, a company called WaveLife purports to be able to relieve pain by using resonant frequencies to treat the root cause. When the body is unable to fully heal damaged tissue, chronic pain occurs. The company developed a patch that can be used at the site of pain, which helps improve cell coherence to trigger healing.
In many cases, yes. In a 2011 study, researchers found that virtual reality was comparable to traditional medications in relieving pain for burn victims receiving wound care. Meta-analyses of neuromodulation using a brain-stimulating device showed a decrease in pain of up to 58% for patients with chronic fibromyalgia pain.
One of the main drawbacks to opioids is that their effectiveness decreases with time as the body adjusts to the presence of the medication. For people who have had to use opioids long-term, these new technologies may hold the key to better, safer, more effective symptom management. Even if they don't completely eliminate a patient's dependence on opioids for pain management, they can be used to reduce it—one class of implantable devices is capable of administering microdoses of medication directly to the spine. Since it completely bypasses digestion and the action of the liver, it allows a much smaller dose of medication to achieve the same effect.
As with anything else, there are some disadvantages to pain management tech. Virtual reality is only really effective for short-term, acute pain. People with arthritis, sciatica, or other long-term pain can't really stay in a virtual world in perpetuity. Implantable neuromodulation devices come with the same risks as any other implant or surgery—they may migrate, provide a surface for an infectious biofilm, result in blood clots, or require revisions. Since every person's pain and nervous system are unique, not all patients will respond to electrical stimuli the same way. Considering the risks posed by opioids, these potential complications may be worth it. These technologies are non-addictive, and don't lose effectiveness with time.
In many cases, it already is. Spine stimulating devices are available for patients with chronic back pain, transcranial devices are used for everything from pain to depression, and other implantables are used to manage Parkinson's disease, migraines, and incontinence. Virtual reality headsets are still being tested, but research with burn victims and women in childbirth shows a lot of promise. WaveLife is planning to launch their frequency-based patches next month.
Chronic pain can be very life-limiting, and so can addiction. While opioids are very effective tools for managing pain, they come with too many drawbacks for safe long-term, regular use. Technologies like neuromodulating devices, virtual reality environments, and resonant frequency devices offer new ways to reduce or relieve pain, without the risk of addiction.
