Huh. I got lots of sympathy from my post-Salsa sciatica episode. Maybe you need a better story…like a tale involving the one that got away.
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The compound for this plant isn’t meant to actually destroy nerves. At least from how the research was explained in the Sci-Show video, its meant to exhaust nerves so they become temporarily desensitized/disabled. As the natural compound works right now it definitely destroys nerves (and tissue), which is something we don’t want.
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I immediately thought of the practicality of my mom injecting herself to relieve chronic arthritis, but then I read about the advocacy for amping up the spray wars to World War I levels and thought “fuck yeah” forget about helping people let’s think of fucked up shit we can do.
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It’s also being used for its ability to selectively destroy tissue near the injection site(and in a way that specifically reduces sensation, no less); rather than shove the central nervous system hard enough to be useful; which really helps narrow the scope for addiction.
It would be hard enough to implement addiction with just the sensory nerves of a small area and no CNS involvement; really hard when the procedure involves killing the exposed nerves.
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Going all in on silencing alerts tends to go poorly; but there is a lot of pain which is telling you something: that you already know; in constant repetition; at egregious volume.
Messages warning you about the immediate risk of hazardous excursions or bringing attention to new issues are all well and good; but they don’t know when to shut up.
Getting a thermal excursion warning when your hand hits the stove is one thing; getting the “burn on hand, burn in hand, burn on hand, burn on hand…” chatter for the subsequent healing period is less helpful.
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I do take the zyflamend for joint pain and I suspect they may operate similarly (it’s basically encapsulated turmeric). I read a bit on resiniferatoxin and it suggests it kills the nerves/nerve endings by having them overdose on calcium. I don’t know much about the life cycle of nerve cells but seems like a good solution at least for incurable chronic pain.
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Nerve endings grow out from the remaining nerve fiber. Since the peripheral nerves are all one cell from the CNS out, that’s pretty simple. No life cycle, generally; most of the nervous system stops reproducing once it’s all in place. (Gross oversimplification.)
Last I looked, turmeric is not particularly neurotoxic and almost certainly isn’t specific to pain nerves or you’d know when you use it the same way we know when we eat or apply capsaicin.
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Capsaicin applied to the skin has its charms, but be careful. I found two things a few years back after peeling about 60 pounds of Hatch chiles by hand:
- My hands’ arthritis went away and for days my hands felt warm
- If you do that, never, and I mean NEVER touch your own or anyone else’s mucous membranes until the stuff is long, long gone.
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It’s amazing that we could have pain so bad that people are now contemplating destroying human nerves completely as a therapeutic method for stopping pain
There are a lot of things that qualify as mucus membranes. Some would be excruciating, others relationship-ending…
The Moroccan Euphorbia resinifera plant produces a resin so spicy that it attains a whopping 16,000,000,000 on the Scoville scale, 10,000x hotter than a Carolina reaper chili.
Don’t tell Sean Evans.
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A teen athlete needs that kind of pain relief (assuming the pain was due to an injury and not something non-athletic)?
Since a wisdom tooth removal that went horribly wrong 15 years ago I’m in chronic pain. But the place where the pain is located does not tempt me to use anything capsaicin-based: it’s my tongue.
Could have been worse. Like a circumcision gone awry.
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Clearing the lunchroom table at work, I touched the bottle of piri-piri sauce that had some dried-up residue. An hour later, when coding at my workplace my eyes were getting heavy. So I rubbed them.
Had to go downstairs with my eyes closed to a colleague to have my eyes rinsed. Fun times.
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Precisely.
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Hmm, interesting typo: ‘Resinifera’ is Latin for ‘resin-bearing’. ‘Res infera’ is ‘thing from Hell.’ I assume it was unintentional, but if you’re subtler than I gave you credit for, I appreciated the joke!
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We grow Scotch Bonnet peppers every year, and sometimes ghost or scorpion. I wear nitrile gloves when I pick at the end of the growing season to prevent the unpleasant consequences of not wearing gloves to pick superhot peppers.
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I am very interested in growing herbal medicinals and have a pretty extensive garden devoted to that purpose, but honest to god, this sounds terrifying. I think I will give it a pass.
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It is intended for use where the pain is not giving any useful information:
Terminal cancer
Joint pain (injected into the joint)
It’s been proposed for major surgery - while under anesthesia the wound is rinsed with capsaicin to exhaust the nerves for a while so recovery is not as painful.
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