Phytotherapeutical implications in pain perception - focusing on schizophrenia

Abstract

Schizophrenia is an extremely complex psychiatric disease where perception of pain is altered, varying from abolition to lack of any kind of changes compared to normal controls and even hypersensitivity. In this way, the hypothesis of amending schizophrenia through pain therapy enhanced the importance of pain medication. But managing pain phenomenon in schizophrenia has large and unknown implications. Nevertheless, pharmacological interactions between the medications for these two entities are unknown and most likely would have a lot of side-effects and therefore ethnopharmacological methods became once again an interesting option. Traditional medicine wisdom was followed in the pursuit of finding connections between ancient knowledge and current scientific proven facts. To our best of knowledge, this is the first time when pain, plants and schizophrenia are discussed together. In this way, it seems that by replacing fully synthesized chemical products, the risk of side-effects decreases. Also, it appears that some plants besides treating pain may have curing effects on the psychotic activities in schizophrenia. Therefore, through this mini-review we emphasized on the advantages of the ethonopharmacological approaches in pain conditions in the context of schizophrenia, but also highlighted some cases of inappropriate usage of plants in traditional therapy.