Anaesthesia | Pain | Peripheral Nervous System

Peripheral Nervous System
Session Overview
Description
This session provides an introduction to the vital role that effective analgesia plays in modern anaesthesia. It describes how pain can be reduced by either reducing nociception, or, blocking its transmission to the central nervous system. Reference is made to the normal pathways involved, more specifically, the chemicals/receptors involved.

Learning Objectives
By the end of this session you will be able to:

• Explain how a painful stimulus is generated
• Describe the chemicals involved in propagating it
• Suggest how this response can be attenuated pharmacologically
• Explain how we can block the transmission of painful stimuli to the central nervous system (CNS)

Prerequisites
Before commencing this session you should:

• Module 05a/Anatomy of the Nociceptive Pathway/Anatomy of the Ascending Pain Pathway (001-0496)
• Module 05a/Neurophysiology of Nociceptive Pathway/Physiology of Pain Transmission (001-0497)

Pain is the greatest fear for the majority of patients. Whether they be undergoing surgery, treatment for cancer or the victim of trauma.

How we minimize this is one of the cornerstones of anaesthesia. It is not only humane and compassionate, but, has additional benefits in attenuation of the stress response.

In this session, we will review how painful stimuli are produced, propagated and the pharmacological ways we can reduce them.

This will provide the rationale for the use of common analgesics, especially non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and local anaesthetics. It will also give a basis for the potential target sites of future drugs.

An arbitrary division between peripheral and central nervous systems has been made, however, this is not the case in vivo, and many compounds have differing actions in each division.