So her husband, a retired pharmaceutical chemist, mixed a different painkiller in his laboratory. There's no question about that,'' the San Jose, Calif., woman said. Shingles is a risk to anyone who has ever had chickenpox. The chickenpox virus, called herpes zoster, hibernates inside the body. As people age, the immune system wanes and herpes zoster can reactivate, causing painful shingles.
Most people recover in a few months.
Narcotic painkillers and a few other drugs offer some relief for this ''postherpatic neuralgia,'' but they all cause serious side effects. The series of shots, every half-inch across her back, took 45 minutes and provided about six hours of pain relief. The injections had to be performed carefully, because lidocaine that penetrates to the bloodstream also can cause serious side effects. Weaker versions of topical lidocaine numb the skin's surface, but they don't penetrate to the nerves and so don't help postherpatic neuralgia, said Dr. Bradley Galer of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. So Hind, who had run a company for years that developed eye and skin drugs, revamped lidocaine to penetrate into the skin, just to the nerves, without all those injections.