Dump those painkillers like morphine aside! You yourself can generate a natural painkiller and that too, up to six times more powerful than the former – it’s your saliva!
The substance yielded by human saliva — dubbed opiorphin — may spawn a new generation of natural painkillers bidding a goodbye to the addictive and psychological side effects of the traditional drug morphine.
Catherine Rougeot at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, who led the research said,
Its pain-suppressive effect is like that of morphine… But we have to test its side effects as it is not a pure painkiller… It may also be an anti-depressive molecule.
The researchers found that the opiorphin works in nerve cells of the spine. During the process, it stops the usual destruction of the natural pain-killing opiates there – the enkephalins.
