Throughout the history of medicine , doctors have prescribe opium - based drug . " Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his agony , none is so oecumenical and so effective as opium,“ said Thomas Sydenham , an English physician during the 1600s .
Morphine is still as oecumenical and effectual as it was during Sydenham ’s time . forward-looking physicians use morphine as a pain fill-in , to slow up looseness , and to help those bear from a pith attack to breathe better . Troy Lisa Holbrook of the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego found that morphine alleviates another character of human suffering — it appears to protect soldier from post - traumatic accent disorderliness ( PTSD ) , an anxiety disorder that occurs after one get a traumatic event .
In a field publish in theNew England Journal of Medicine , Holbrook find that soldier bruise in Iraq who received morphine immediately after get their trauma were less likely to have PTSD .
Holbrook canvass the records of 696 soldier who were injure by improvised volatile devices , wayside bomb , gunshots , or mortar rounds . None of these discipline hold up head injuries . About 70 percentage received morphia within an hour of injury . On average , doctors diagnosing PTSD in soldiers about two months after they sustained their combat injury . Sixty - one percentage of soldier who received morphia had PTSD , compared to 76 percent of soldiers who did n’t get morphia injections . The researchers found that anyone who receive morphine — regardless of dose , gender , severity of injury , or age — had a decrease chance of suffering from PTSD . While Holbrook is unsure exactly why the morphine protect against PTSD , Dr. have long suspect that morphine inhibits the production of norepinephrine , which manipulate combat - or - flight responses . The morphine might boil down the fear and stress as well as the pain of an injury .
[ Image credit : Gaius Cornelius . ]
