New drug to treat pain and addiction

Texas A&M researchers aim to develop one drug that treats pain, memory and nicotine addiction

Although pain, memory and nicotine addiction may not seem to be related, they actually share a common player: the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. That’s why Texas A&M researchers are working to develop drugs to enhance the function of these receptors in the brain, which could have three very different applications: easing pain, slowing the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s and other neuropsychiatric diseases and making it easier for people to stop smoking.

At first glance this is great news, but we are really just by-passing our brains ability to chose a new response and instead giving it another pill.

There is a pill for that! How about that?

The beliefs, assumptions, expectations that you’ve received from the medical world about drugs and how they help mind stands between who you are and your current health situation or addiction you are in.  It interprets the world around it, and how it feels about what it sees.

How did that belief get there?  It was placed there by an authority figure in a stressful or emotional time.  However, when the those assumptions in the mind change, the person changes, including their health.

“People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations,” Stanley Milgram social psychologist at Yale University says. “To reframe them. To reconstruct them. To even reconstruct themselves.”

So using another pill to get us to stop taking a pill or smoking is not solving the true problem, hypnosis gets to the problem and reframes the person as a non-smoker, as a pain free person, as someone in control.

Stop with the “there is a pill for that” BS!