How To Treat Pain

By Author: Steven Johnson
Total Articles: 494
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Let's start with something uncontroversial. If you have an acute injury, you will hope it heals and the pain goes away naturally. This allows some flexibility in the management of the pain. It's under your control. Those that prefer to monitor the pace of the healing more accurately, will opt for relatively low dosages of the painkiller of choice. The problem with too much painkiller is it gets in the way of rehabilitation. At a time when you should be exercising to recover muscle tone and improve mobility, you need all the warning signs of overexertion. If you have taken too much painkiller, it's easy to believe you have healed more fully than is the case. Further inuries can significantly delay recovery. An alternate strategy is to take very high initial doses to maximize the amount of painkiller in the bloodstream when the pain is at its worst. You can then taper off the painkiller as you come into the physical therapy and rehabilitation phase. Since there is no real risk of dependence with only short-term use, you can afford to take quite high doses.

Should the health problem be chronic, the issue is the drug strategy. ...
... If you take any drug over time, the body builds up tolerance. This reduces the effectiveness of the drug as the body adapts to it. The choice is then either to increase the dosage or to switch to a more powerful drug. This is slippery slope to dependence, i.e. unless you're careful, you can end up physically or psychologically dependent. In such a case, dealing with the withdrawal symptoms can be worse than the original health problem.

One of the reasons why we're one of the most medicated nations is the lack of regulation on the advertising of drugs. The FDA's main limitation is that the manufacturers must give everyone seeing or reading an ad promoting a drug a fair warning of the side effects. Other than that, the manufacturers are able to bombard us with long and short reminders of the brand names and what they are used to treat. So, from the earliest years of watching television onward, we're persuaded there's a drug to fix every problem. All we have to do is remember to ask for what we want by name. Our doctors will write out the prescription and the cure is on the way. This simple linkage between drugs and the cure is somewhat destructive. There are often alternative ways of solving the health problems but we're less inclined to trust them when our drugs are apparently so good.

Long-term pain relief can be managed with the use of drugs. Our doctors prefer it. They make more money out of their practices if all we do is ask for a drug and leave with a prescription. So Tramadol is an excellent drug for moderate to severe pain and, so long as you maintain a low dosage, you can safely take it for quite long periods of time. The acid test comes as dependence slowly builds. The more you give into maintaining the relief through the pill bottle, the greater the risk of dependence. It's at this point you should discuss alternates with your doctor. Moving up from Tramadol into the opiates is medically quite dangerous.