Controlling cancer pain is no longer just a dream

  Cancer is one of the diseases that seriously threaten human health and life today. About 70% of advanced cancer patients have different degrees of pain, which seriously affects patients’ work, study and life, and even brings unbearable physical and mental pain to patients and their families. Therefore, effective control of cancer pain treatment has become an important direction for the development of pain science.  I. WHO three-step pain relief program: It is the preferred treatment program for cancer pain treatment. Reasonable and comprehensive drug treatment can relieve the pain of most patients, but there are still 10%-20% of patients with intractable pain who do not respond well to the above drug delivery methods and need to adopt interventional treatment. The use of high doses of analgesic drugs can produce serious and intolerable side effects, such as nausea and vomiting, nephrotoxicity, and neuropsychotoxicity such as drowsiness and delirium, which hinder the use of traditional routes of medication.  Nerve destructive therapy: Nerve destructive therapy is effective for pain caused by tumor invasion of nerves, but because cancer pain is not simply caused by invasion of nerves, and because pain caused by tumor metastasis is generally diffuse, therefore, nerve destructive therapy alone is not effective, and often needs to be used together with drugs.  Epidural drug injection therapy: Epidural drug injection therapy reduces the dosage of drugs and is more effective for pain with limited location. However, since the epidural drug diffusion is limited, it may not be particularly effective for a wide range of pain, and the epidural catheter is easily blocked, which also limits the further application of epidural drug delivery.  Intrathecal drug infusion system is a new means of cancer pain treatment. Intrathecal drug infusion treatment is to infuse drugs into the patient’s subarachnoid space through a drug infusion pump buried in the patient’s body, which acts on the corresponding sites in the spinal cord, blocking the transmission of pain signals to the brain through the spinal cord and preventing pain signals from reaching the cerebral cortex, so as to achieve the purpose of pain control. Since the drug acts directly on the central receptors, the dosage is only 1/300 of the oral dosage, and the side effects are less and milder because the dosage of the drug is greatly reduced, and even if they occur, they disappear quickly after a short period of adaptation.  The indications for intrathecal drug infusion therapy are: 1. cancer pain; 2. intractable pain after back surgery; 3. osteoporotic pain; 4. complex focal pain syndrome; 5. axial trunk pain; 6. others, such as arachnoiditis, postherpetic neuralgia, etc.