Ketamine Treatments for Chronic Pain
Does Low-Dose Intravenous Ketamine Help Alleviate Pain Syndromes?
Complex Regional Pain Syndrome is a disorder which can be accompanied by severe pain that’s often both chronic and resistant to conventional therapies. Researchers from Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center found, “limited low-dose infusions of a widely used anesthetic drug may relieve the often intolerable and debilitating pain of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS).” The team released a report entailing successful treatment of a 9-year case of Type I CRPS with an intravenous ketamine infusion in an adult female patient. Objective of the Study: The objective of the study was to find out if the use of ketamine provides meaningful improvements in pain scores and betters the quality of life for people suffering from CRPS. To achieve the objective, the team focused on analyzing...
What’s Next for Treatment-Resistant Chronic Pain
Understanding & Overcoming Neuropathic Pain Chronic pain ranks as a significant public health problem, putting an emotional and financial burden on millions of people. One of the biggest challenges for medical practitioners as a whole is when pain is neuropathic in origin. In neuropathic pain, the nerve fibers themselves become damaged, dysfunctional, or injured. Neuropathic pain proves resistant to many forms of treatment, leaving people frustrated, limited in daily life, and not knowing where to turn. Much of the alterations in neuropathic pain occur at the spinal cord. Ongoing pain over stimulates NMDA receptors in the spine, causing them to overreact to future sensory input. Mild pain is felt as more severe pain, and it causes very real physiological reactions. Even normal s...
