Non-cocaine, topical anesthetics can kill pain when repairing skin wounds
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 - 14:30
in Health & Medicine
While some pain killers need to be injected into the damaged tissue in order to work, topical anesthetics only need to be spread on the surface. The earliest examples of "topical" anesthetics contained cocaine, but now a new systematic review has shown that newer agents that don't contain cocaine can effectively treat pain caused by torn skin. This makes these pain killers an attractive choice for doctors who need to sew-up a patient's skin wound.