🔬 A Breakthrough in Chronic Pain: New Hope for Fibromyalgia

Hi Friend

Hope you are well and have had a good week so far.

In a groundbreaking discovery this year, researchers at the University of Aberdeen, led by Dr Guy Bewick, have uncovered an entirely new pathway in the body that explains why some pain doesn’t go away — a finding that could reshape the future of fibromyalgia treatment.

📌 Why Chronic Pain is So Hard to Treat

Acute pain — like the pain you feel when you cut your finger or twist your ankle — is well understood. It’s the body’s alarm system, alerting us to damage so we can protect and heal ourselves.

But for millions of people living with fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions, pain becomes detached from any clear injury. It lingers for months or years, often shifting around the body, seemingly without cause.

Until now, medicine has treated chronic pain mostly by dampening the nervous system in general — with painkillers, antidepressants, or sedatives. But these treatments rarely tackle the root cause, and can bring side effects that add to patients’ burden.

🧬 The Discovery: A Hidden ‘Pain Switch’

Dr Bewick’s team discovered that when muscles are exposed to ongoing stress or micro-injuries — common in fibromyalgia — they release unusually high levels of glutamate, a neurotransmitter that acts like a chemical messenger between nerves.

This excess glutamate activates a specific protein on the ends of pain-sensing nerves, called the neurokinin 1 receptor (NK1R). Once switched on, NK1R triggers a persistent pain signal that travels to the spinal cord and brain — keeping the pain alive, even when the original injury has healed or was too minor to detect.

In laboratory models, when the researchers blocked this receptor:
✅ The abnormal pain stopped, but normal sensation — the sharp feeling you’d get if you touched something hot, for example — stayed intact.
✅ Even in a patient with severe spinal cord injury pain, targeting this pathway dramatically reduced their long-term pain signals.

This is the first direct evidence that chronic pain is driven by a distinct biological circuit — a hidden ‘switch’ separate from the normal pain pathways we need for safety.

🌟 Why This Could Be Transformative for Fibromyalgia

For decades, fibromyalgia patients have struggled to prove that their pain is real and not ‘just psychological’. This research shows there’s a clear, measurable chemical chain reaction happening in the body — confirming what people with fibromyalgia have known all along.

Better still, this opens a door for new drugs that could precisely target this faulty pain switch. Instead of sedating the whole nervous system or numbing the brain, doctors could one day prescribe a treatment that blocks only the chronic pain signals, leaving the healthy pain response untouched.

This could:

• Provide stronger, longer-lasting relief

• Reduce side effects like sedation, dependency, or tolerance

• Decrease reliance on opioids and other broad-spectrum painkillers

🔮 What Comes Next?

While this is still at an early research stage, the discovery has attracted major interest from the pharmaceutical world. The next steps are:

• Designing safe drugs that can block the NK1R receptor in humans

• Running larger clinical trials to confirm the effect in fibromyalgia, back pain, arthritis, and other conditions

• Understanding whether lifestyle factors — like diet, stress, or physical therapy — can influence this glutamate pathway, offering non-drug ways to help manage it too

If all goes well, experts say the first targeted treatments based on this discovery could reach human trials within 5–10 years — a realistic but hopeful timeline for people who have lived for too long without real answers.

✅ Key Takeaway

My chronic pain platform is really taking shape and all the content/assessments and therapies and live sessions will be uploaded soon. There will also be exclusive discounts on supplements and vagal nerve stimulators plus more. Once the platform is fully live the price will be increased, however if you sign up now you will continue to pay the lower price long term even after the price increase. There is a free 7 day trial so you can try before you commit. Sign up here

I hope you found this weeks newsletter useful,

Regards

Dr Ahmed