Everything – drugs included – sooner or later travels the sewers.
So Tempe and ASU plan to study wastewater as part of a public health effort to identify substance abuse hotspots and evaluate efforts to reduce opioid prescriptions.
Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
Tempe Partners With ASU to Detect Drugs in Wastewater
Opioid abuse and addiction dominate the headlines these days. But these concerns obscure a larger story about the treatment of chronic pain in America.
In this feature, I explore the shortcomings of opioids with respect to treating chronic pain — and offer some legitimate pain management alternatives.
Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
Experts Offer Non-Opioid Options For Managing Chronic Pain
Researchers are developing a class of painkillers that could offer an alternative to opioids, or at least way to taper down their dosage.
Read/listen to my full story at KJZZ’s Arizona Science Desk:
UA Researchers Seek More Targeted Path to Fighting Pain
Pain is essential to life, and not just in a Nietzschean, what-does-not-destroy-me-makes-me-stronger sense. It alerts us to injuries and prods us to stop poking at our wounds. It’s God’s megaphone, nature’s cone of shame. Pain is so essential, in fact, that losing our capacity for it can have life-threatening consequences.
Yet we’ve really only begun to understand how pain works in the past 40 years or so, thanks in large part to technological advances. Granted, most painkillers sport a list of side effects that reads like a Tomás de Torquemada’s own torture manual, but at least we understand something of the nervous mechanisms that underpin our owies. That said, just what on Earth is a COX inhibitor? Or an NSAID? And most important of all…
