Please see our new page “Controlling Pain with Caffeine” to find out more about caffeine’s analgesic powers.
It was proven decades ago, in double-blind, peer reviewed studies, that caffeine is powerful pain killer. But doctors and researchers continue to rediscover this fact for themselves, suddenly waking up to the fact that caffeine is the strongest non-prescription analgesic in the pharmacopoeia.
The latest scientists to recognize that caffeine kills pain are members of a team from Norway who conducted an experiment with office workers. Their study, focusing on repetitive actions with a high liability of producing discomfort, showed that those workers who drank coffee before sitting down to work at a computer for 90 minutes reported less pain in their necks and shoulders than those who didn’t drink coffee. Some participants had previously suffered chronic neck and shoulder pain, while others hadn’t. However, people in both groups who drank coffee reported less pain, the researchers said.
People in the study arrived in the laboratory first thing in the morning and were instructed to drink only one cup of coffee or to skip coffee entirely. Participants then performed a computer task for 90 minutes, using only a mouse.
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Researchers found that those people who drank a cup of coffee developed less pain over the course of the 90 minutes than those who hadn’t drank coffee. Further, at the end of the computer task, the coffee drinkers rated their pain as less intense than the other study participants.
The study, conducted by researchers at the Sunnaas Rehabilitation Hospital in Norway, was published on September 3 in BMC Research Notes.
