Caffeine Is A Better Painkiller Than Morphine In Certain Situations, Scientists Discover

The world is chockful of effective painkillers, with Morphine being one of the most well-known. However, scientists recently discovered that caffeine can actually be better at helping to deal with pain than powerful drugs in certain situations. It would appear that the effects depend on how rested the subjects are, which only makes sense since it’s caffeine, after all.

Boston Children’s Hospital researchers made the discovery involving experiments with sleep-deprived mice. According to the paper that they published, the researchers subjected the mice to pain stimulants and treated them with certain painkillers to see how well they would respond.

Prior to giving the subjects drugs to dull the pain, the researchers noted that the exhausted mice were more sensitive to pain and responded faster to stimulants. When the painkillers were introduced, the mice responded by basically being able to deal with the stimulants easier, but it would seem that caffeine did a better job at it.

In a press release, Kirby Center direct at BCH, Clifford Woolf explained that these findings have a significant impact on how patients with chronic or acute pain are treated. Instead of simply flooding their systems with drugs, doctors could instead make sure that the patients are as well-rested as possible.

“This represents a new kind of analgesic that hadn’t been considered before, one that depends on the biological state of the animal,” Woolf said. “Such drugs could help disrupt the chronic pain cycle, in which pain disrupts sleep, which then promotes pain, which further disrupts sleep.”

This conclusion might seem obvious to some, but doctors know all too well how patients suffering from diseases that cause them pain all day every day can prevent subjects from getting enough rest. A lot of times, when the patients are prescribed medicine to help deal with the pain, the drugs themselves contribute to sleepless nights. This study simply reinforces the idea that there should be more focus on the rest aspect than before.