These kinds of implants have serious risks including infections etc, but for people with long term chronic pain there are few options.
"I can't go to work and feed my family because everything hurts so bad" can become a common statement for these people. In addition, addiction to painkillers, spending a huge percentage of your income at compounding pharmacies, and turning to illegal and possibly dangerous drugs to save a buck or to fill the gap between your needs and the insurance companies' coverage are all issues that a non-chemical pain management system like this could solve.
I'm sure it's dangerous and weird to toy with your brain but for many people in America alone the risk would be more than worth the reward.
The DEA tried to ban it a few years ago but too many cancer patients testified before Congress how well it worked compared to the prescription opioids. The DEA was forced to bow out.
The cool thing about Mitragyna speciosa is that it's a tree, a pretty hardy one. In my experience, the older trees have more potent leaves, but ideally, one could plant this tree in their backyard and never have to worry about being dependent on outside help for their pain ever again. You just dry the leaves and make tea from them.
It also fucks your kidneys, in a pretty short time of chronic use.
I've been taking Mitragyna for years and have no kidney issues. My kidney function is checked regularly and my GFR and BUN ratios are fine.
Secondly, any drug, even antidepressants, have some form of dependency. The withdrawal from Mitragyna isn't bad. With a simple taper, one can easily get off of it. I've done so myself a couple times. Google oxycodone withdrawal, Xanax withdrawal, Lexapro withdrawal..ad infinitum. Most controlled prescription drugs have far worse withdrawals.
Here's one bit of truth I'll agree with: buying Mitragyna from gas stations or head shops is a terrible way to acquire it. And these sources may be impure or tainted and cause health issues. Perhaps that's where your kidney damage statements come from.
Always buy Mitragyna from a reputable and GMP certified vendor. The American Kratom Association lists some vendors: https://www.americankratom.org/
Mitragyna is affordable, shelf safe, and sustainable. It's a silver bullet compared to the unsustainable lifestyle that chronic pain doctors are pumping out with their prescription pads. What other questions do you have?
I know a guy who had horrid back pain. He was ok with opoids. He even admitted they reduced his pain, but he just felt better about life being on them.
His doctor just decided to not prescribe opoids for any reason.
My friend is miserable now, and takes too much Ibuprofen.
From my unerstanding, you can only take them for about a week before they become addictive, and that in itself is fine, but they become less and less effective as time goes on as well. You've got to take more and more to get the same effect.
Opioids are really only good for short-term pain. Also, doctors are really under the gun right now because they have been overprescribing opioids for years and a non-trivial segment of the population (at least in the US) is addicted to them.
Why the pharmaceutical companies haven't done to paracetamol what they did to acetanilide, I don't understand. Providing AM404 directly would avoid the production of NAPQI in the body.
Most of the terpenes in cannabis strains are also found in other plants to varying degrees. Pure extracts are available and legal without question.
I can’t say much about their efficacy though, because I haven’t done a deep dive. Id love to hear from anyone who has done the research or has personal experience, especially without THC or CBD along for the ride.
As far as terpenes specifically, I've been hearing some recent positive buzz about linalool.
>Example ChR2 expression in the prelimbic PFC. Highmagnification (100x) view of the expression of YFP-ChR2 in the prelimbic PFC demonstrated the co-staining of pyramidal neuron markers (CaMKII) with YFP. Arrows point to examples of co-stained neurons.
(from abstract and supplementary info, scihub is kind of down)
On their own (generally speaking!), very few neurons "respond" to low intensity light. "Optogenetics" stuff like this inserts a gene encoding a light sensitive ion channel in order to make cells responsive to a specific wavelength of light.
So there's two types of targeting here: Targeting gene expression to a certain population of cells, and then spatially targeting a group of those cells with the light - Blue light doesn't travel very far in tissue. (Also targeting multiple cell populations within a region using multiple colors of light + differently sensitive proteins).
Of course your comment still stands - Presumably not all the CamKII-positive PFC neurons are involved in nociception, and rats can't talk about their conscious experience so the answers there are limited to what questions researchers chose to ask using the limited tools available.
> Life follows a simple set of heuristics with an extensive set of exceptions.
And that's OK: heuristics allow a person to intuit some high-level behavior without having to derive it from the lower-level rules (laws). It's readily admitted that the heuristic isn't 100% accurate, and when it's inaccurate you fall back to that explicit derivation process.
From the outsider view of biology, there appear to be many heuristics for which we don't know how to derive from the underlying laws. Chemistry, at various points in time, has had similar issues, but over time we've expanded the amount of things we can derive from underlying physics. Biology, I hope, will follow in time.
We think you can do much better for many applications with targeted stimulation, and that’s the direction that many of these implant technologies are heading. I’m a Neuroscientist working on BCI
Many psychiatric drugs affect large parts of the brain despite the drugs' efficacies being determined by their effects on much smaller parts of the brain.
For example, some anxiolytic and antidepressant effects are mediated by changes at certain serotonin-1A receptors in certain parts of the brain, yet common drugs like SSRIs change serotonin levels all over the brain and body.
You could categorize SSRI-induced activation of 5HT2C receptors as a 'bizarre malfunction', as it causes increased anxiety and dysphoria, which is the opposite of what you'd want if you're trying to treat anxiety or depression.
Alcohol works like this in the body, as well.
I'm skeptical of most brain implants for other reasons[1], though.
This requires genetically engineered mice, which is why they only have this working for mice?
It says: "The chip then automatically triggers a light beam to stimulate the region, activating neurons that can override pain signals."
Isn't that potentially stimulating millions or even hundreds of millions of neurons? We don't know what each individual neuron is doing. How is it possible to do this without causing bizarre malfunctions of the brain at best, or completely lobotomizing someone at worst?