Pain Relief Nanotechnology

Pain management and relief is an area of medicine fraught with complications, from the lack of basic science knowledge of its inner workings to the potential for misuse of pain medication. These problems are all exacerbated by hospital systems driven by a profit motive and pharmaceutical influence of treatment protocols. And while there is active research in the field, there are still very few safe and effective solutions in the context of traditional, Western medicine.   That’s why researchers have been investigating non-pharmacological methods of pain reduction, which would mitigate the inherent risks carried by addictive pain medications like opioids. A research group at Northwestern University has recently developed a tiny, flexible cuff-like device small enough to wrap around a nerve that may help relieve pain through alternative means. By pumping coolant through the cuff, heat can be drawn from the associated nerve. When tested in rats, this new device was shown to produce behaviors indicative of a reduction in pain. While there are still many unanswered questions about how this device could work in real, human clinical settings, these new findings show that the use of technology in pain management can be a powerful tool that can assist patients in their road to recovery. You can read more about this exciting new research here.    Author BioNatalie Wang is currently working on her undergraduate degrees in Neuroscience and Medicine, Science, and the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University as a Hodson Trust Scholar. Her research interests are in DNA damage and repair, as well as post-operative delirium in older patients. Natalie started volunteering with WIS PDX in 2019 as a member of the outreach and education team, and is now the producer and a co-host of WIS's podcast, WISterhood. When not listening to music or doom-scrolling on Twitter, she can be found checking closets for Narnia.