Pain relief: Medical professionals are experimenting with chemicals found in chilli peppers and other spicy foods as a new type of pain killer. (Flickr photo by saguayo)
Have you ever eaten a spicy pepper that made your tongue go numb? That blast of spice may just be the next thing to take away other pains in your body.

Medical professionals are experimenting with the chemicals that give peppers their powerful punch as a way of treating painful areas after surgery.

The chemical is an ultra-purified version of capsaicin, and doctors are putting drops of that concoction directing into open wounds and surgical entry sites for procedures like knee replacement surgery.

Patients are under anesthesia during the administration of the drug, so they don’t feel the initial burning blast of the chemical’s application. How the process works, is that the pepper-like chemicals then numb the nerves in the area of the application, preventing them from passing on the pain messages to the patient’s brain.

In other variations on this process, other researchers are looking at ways to apply this pain killing process to women going through childbirth and also in injecting pain killers in the mouth area for doing dental work.

Among tests done on knee replacement patients in California, those getting capsaicin had significantly lower amounts of pain in their recovery in the first three days after surgery. In another U.S. study of 50 knee replacement cases, those patients receiving capsaicin used less morphine in the 48 hours after surgery than those who didn’t.

Of course, no one is suggesting that the next time you fall and hurt yourself that you immediately apply heavy amounts of salsa to the impacted area.

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