An interesting facet of this discussion on the body’s opiates and the ability of the brain to modulate pain is that it begins to explain how acupuncture may work. Practised for centuries in China, acupuncture involves using fine needles that are stuck into patients at different points. With the needles in the body, pain is reduced to such an extent that surgery can be performed without anaesthesia.
Many Western doctors and scientists scoffed at the notion of acupuncture working and ascribed it to one huge placebo effect. If they had investigated thoroughly, they would have discovered that veterinarians in China were using acupuncture to operate on animals. No cow, for example, will put up with the pain of surgery because of a placebo effect!
It turns out that acupuncture causes the release of large amounts of the endogenous opiates. This was proved by blocking the brain receptors for the opiates by a synthetic drug. The blocking cancels out the effect of any endogenous opiates. In such a case acupuncture no longer effectively blocks the pain. It is worth mentioning that the analgesic action of internal opiates is many times stronger than that of morphine; it is 200 times higher in the case of endorphins and more than 400 times higher in the case of dynorphins.
Left unanswered is the question—why does looking like a pincushion cause the release of the endogenous opiates? Answer from latest scientific research—don’t know! To be more precise, several theories have been proposed to explain the action of acupuncture. They involve both the idea of activation of the opioids as well as suppression of pain signalling but no confirmed theory has been detailed in the literature.
Here is an interesting footnote to the story of stress and the release of endogenous opiates—fresh from winning the Nobel Prize in 1972, it was Roger Guillemin* who demonstrated that stress triggers the release of beta-endorphin from the pituitary gland.