How does pain medicine work

Want a daily email of lesson plans that span all subjects and age groups? Learn more. How do pain relievers work? Some people take aspirin or ibuprofen to treat everyday aches and pains, but how exactly do the different classes of pain relievers work?

Learn about the basic physiology of how humans experience pain, and the mechanics of the medicines we've invented to block or circumvent that discomfort.

Learn More. Additional Resources for you to Explore. All those different brands, varieties, and strengths filling the shelves at the drugstore can give anyone a headache! All questions are welcome — serious, weird or wacky! I want to understand how pain medicine like Panadol works in our body.

In short, pain medicine is able to block the processes that cause the feeling of pain. To understand why, we need to explain a bit more about how pain works. Pain happens when electrical signals travel from the spot where you hurt yourself up your nerves, to the spinal cord and then up to the brain.

So when we feel pain from a burnt hand, we quickly remove it from a fire. Or if a dog bites us, the pain tells us to run away. So even though pain hurts, pain is important.

It can protect us from more injury. Feeling no pain at all is actually quite dangerous. Read more: Curious Kids: Do animals sleep like people? Do snails sleep in their shells? Some of these nerve endings can sense pain, like from a burn or a blow to a body part like your friend's foot hitting your shin.

When cells in your body are injured or damaged, they release chemicals called prostaglandins say: pross-tuh-GLAN-dinz. The special nerve endings that sense pain are very sensitive to this chemical.

When prostaglandin is released, the nerve endings respond to it by picking up and transmitting the pain and injury messages through the nervous system to the brain. They tell the brain everything about the pain, like where it is and how much it hurts. The brain then responds: Yow!

Pain is painful, but it isn't all bad. It's your body's early warning system that something is wrong, so you can take steps to correct the problem. For example, if you couldn't feel pain, and you had your hand on a hot stove, you wouldn't know your hand was burning. Because of pain, your brain gets the message to get your hand off the stove right away!