Before Aspirin:
Endorphins

It was only in 1975 when scientists John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz discovered a family of proteins called endorphins. Endorphins may have been discovered only recently, but they are the oldest painkillers we have. What do you have to do to use endorphins? You have to hurt. That's all. Unlike some painkillers that come from plants or are made from crude oil, endorphins are made by your own body. Your body feels pain to warn you that something is wrong, that you've been injured, or that you are sick and need to seek treatment. But the body has ways of making the pain bearable, too. When you experience severe pain, your body releases endorphins. Endorphins interact with certain parts of your brain to help lessen the pain. For example, women giving birth produce high levels of endorphins to ease their labor pains. It is interesting that endorphins interact with the same parts of the brain as do drugs like morphine. Morphine, it turns out, relieves pain because it mimics the behavior of your body's own endorphins.

Logo of the Endorphin Fix adventure   race.

But there are more pleasant ways to make your body produce endorphins. Endorphins are thought to be involved in helping your brain experience pleasure. So eating chocolate is thought to make your body produce endorphins. If you decide to burn off that chocolate with some good hard exercise, that will make your body produce endorphins, too. This is why long-distance runners experience "runner's high." The harder you exercise, the more endorphins your body makes. No wonder the Odyssey Adventure Racing calls its annual two-day, 100-mile, running, hiking, climbing, paddling, and biking race through the mountains of West Virginia the Endorphin Fix!

But endorphins aren't always enough to relieve our pain. So people from ancient times have looked for outside sources of pain relief, and began by looking to the world around them, as you'll see on the next few pages.