Hot Chili Peppers as an Alternative to Painkillers
Many people are afraid to undergo a surgery because of the pain that they would experience after. Anesthesia is very helpful in keeping a patient sleeping and without pain during long surgeries, but once the surgery is over and the patient wakes up, anesthesia does not work anymore because of its limitations. Scientists have been looking for an alternative, and they actually discovered how an extract from chili peppers can mitigate pain. Yes, we are talking about the same peppers you use to make a hot sauce.
Researchers have tried to use a chemical from chili as an anesthetic by directly applying it into fresh open wounds during a surgery. The exact substance they used was a purified capsaicin, which is what makes chili hot. What is even more interesting is that it also prevents infections. Patients were under anesthesia so they did not feel the initial pain caused by capsaicin. Treating exposed nerves with a lot of capsaicin will numb them for a few weeks, and that’s exactly what patients suffering pain want. Capsaicin can easily replace narcotic painkillers and it has almost no side effects.
There is a receptor called TRPV1 in pain-sensing nerve cells, and capsaicin easily binds to that receptor. It produces painkilling effect, but a burning effect as well, because TRPV1 senses also heat. New studies are trying to suppress that burn by various techniques.
Chili has been part of traditional medicine for hundreds of years. Modern science can already explain that capsaicin is inducing heat because of the way how it targets pain-sensing cells. Researchers and universities are trying to find the perfect mix of anesthetic drugs and capsaicin that would mitigate most of the side effects of man-made anesthetics. Few of their goals are to develop more effective epidurals that would allow women to experience less stress during childbirths, or dental injections that would not affect the whole mouth. Another research is testing a thousand times more potent version of capsaicin in cancer patients, trying to lower their pain.
Because of serious side effects of drugs like Morphine and other opioid painkillers, capsaicin from chili peppers was brought into the limelight. There’s a real need for better pain relief, and capsaicin looks very promising.
