What Does Science Tell Us About Pain and Addiction?

Medicine has always been about taking away your pain, says Walter J. Koroshetz, MD, director of the NINDS. Here, he discusses how pain medicine has fuel addiction, and how addiction creates changes in the brain.

Transcript

00:00

Pain hurts. I mean, everyone's had pain and they know how bad it is.

00:06

Medicine, from the beginning, has always been about trying to alleviate pain and we're still imperfect at it.

00:14

The drugs that people are being prescribed are addicting medications and, unfortunately, addiction

00:22

is another brain circuit problem that is hard-wired in and when you get addicted, the brain circuitry

00:29

is clearly altered. So we're having hundreds of people dying from overdose of pain medicine.

00:37

So that really, I think, it's kind of like these two things which are coming together, really pressurizing the science

00:43

community to get a drug that is very effective and not addicting. I think it's really critical that we get that.