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Posts Tagged ‘tramadol’

Over the centuries, we’ve been looking for a magic bullet to give instant pain relief. One of the earliest discoveries was based on the poppy. Depending on how the plant is processed, a range of different drugs can be produced. But there’s always been a problem – the extracts are addictive. Even short-term use can produce destructive consequences. When there were no alternatives, significant numbers of people were hooked, sometimes when only suffering minor symptoms. This led to increasing regulation and control as government grew concerned over the social consequences. The first steps were to make all the opiate drugs prescription only. This has never been a perfect system. Drugs always leak on to the streets when the rewards for illegal distribution are sufficiently high. But with the arrival of more effective alternates, it’s been slightly easier to control the level of addiction. Except control is never perfect. The death rates show more Americans die through the abuse of prescription medication than through the use of heroine and cocaine combined.

We’re the most heavily medicated group of people on the face of the planet. It’s a sad fact more teens experiment with painkillers than cigarettes. Yet every time a state or the federal government suggests tightening up on the prescription of painkillers, there’s an outcry. The libertarians among us believe we all have an absolute right to take whatever drugs we want. There should be no legal limits when the only victims are ourselves. So attempts to discipline doctors for overprescribing the narcotic painkillers often stall. It’s at this point the argument gets mixed up with the problems of end-of-life care.

There’s a strong view in many states that people should be allowed to die with dignity. This means, say, a cancer patient should be given high doses of painkillers even though this will accelerate death. The pro-lifers object saying this is murder, i.e. not death caused by the cancer, but death caused by the drugs. Yet, if lawmakers limit the use of these more powerful drugs without multiple exceptions, people who suffer chronic severe pain may be left without relief. Sometimes the pain from arthritis demands the use of the most powerful drugs. If the discretion of a doctor has been limited, many may be left in pain.

Patients get caught in the middle between government’s legitimate concerns about the level of addiction and the politically active groups of citizens who want no regulations for some purposes and criminalization for others. When people suggest a compromise to limit these drugs to supervised conditions, it denies pain relief to people at home. This is an unfair winners and losers situation. Worse, with tighter regulation and continuing demand, the profits from selling these drugs on the streets rises fast. So everyone has a good case for more or less regulation. Once people find Tramadol is no longer sufficient on its own, they pressure the doctors to prescribe the next strongest drug. The fact this is more addictive is not important. People just want to kill the pain. This highlights the flaw in a system that only sees relief in pills. In other countries, cognitive behavioral therapy more routinely shows people how to cope without drugs or only using Tramadol when the pain flares up.

The common sense answer is an unpleasant sensation caused by anything from a small broken bone to cancer. Obviously, the causes of pain are not the same. Doctors label some pain as acute where you will recover and the pain will go away naturally. So, after proper treatment, a broken bone will be strong again and you can move around like nothing happened. But cancer can be terminal. If you catch it early enough, the treatments can produce a remission and let you lead a good life. Unfortunately the more usual pattern is late diagnosis and treatment that fails to give anything more than temporary relief. Then it’s a painful decline. This is depressing, but it also points to a valuable lesson. With temporary pain, you can take a big dose of a painkiller for a short period. If you have no hope of survival, the priority is now making you as comfortable as possible. This also allows you to take large doses of the most powerful drugs. The problem comes with causes that will persist for years. This is called chronic pain and it requires a different approach.

So here’s a radical idea for you. Pain is a good thing! Indeed, any attempt to make pain go away is dangerous! OK, let’s back up a little. Think of pain as being like an alarm that goes off in your home if a burglar enters. This is a useful warning. If you are home and an NRA member, you can pick up your gun and defend yourself. Now change the burglar to bacteria or a virus that breaks into your body. Although your auto immune system is going to slow down the damage these invaders might cause, the pain is there to tell you to get some real help. Fortunately, medicine has been improving over the centuries. There are now surgeons in ERs to stitch you back together and give you whatever drugs are likely to cure you quickly. Wait, you’re complaining that once pain has done its job and you’ve got the treatment, you want to switch off the pain. Well, that’s not a good idea. Let’s say you take a massive dose of some really powerful painkillers, how are you going to know when the pain actually goes away? How are you going to know whether it’s spreading? One of the most important symptoms to help doctors give you the right treatment is to have a steady stream of information from you about how much it hurts, and whether the pain is going away or spreading. Obviously, if it’s spreading, a different treatment will be required.

So before you start complaining about pain, remember it warns you when you have a problem. The fact you might be receiving treatment for the first problem doesn’t stop you from getting a second problem. That’s one of the reasons why Tramadol is considered one of the best drugs. It reduces the pain to levels easily tolerated and still lets pain do its job, say by warning you about that hot pan you just touched. Until our medical researchers work out how to turn off just the one pain message, you will just have to learn how to live your life with some pain. Tramadol is the best in these situations.

When we’re born, we pause helpless for a month or so and then begin the process of exploring the world. In this, pain is a vital part of the learning process. We knock into hard objects and fall. Only when we understand cause and effect can we move around safely. If parents and authority figures are responsible, they teach us some degree of acceptance. Life cannot stop just because of a little pain. You have to pick yourself up and go on with what you were doing. This also builds self-confidence, a sense we can work through discomfort and pain to produce the results we want. Although parents are right to have a general protectiveness, all children should be allowed to develop a tolerance for pain. Should the day come when they are involved in accidents or fall more seriously ill, they should be psychologically prepared. It does no one any good if they collapse in a heap, weeping and wailing we should make the pain go away. For better or worse, we need pain to survive.

Put simply, pain is a warning system when something goes wrong with the body. Where and how we live is also full of potential dangers. Without pain, we might not immediately notice if we pick up something that’s too hot. Either way, we must know to get medical attention, or quickly drop the hot object and then get medical attention. The problem with this wonderful system then becomes all too obvious. When we’ve done the right thing and got medical attention, we cannot turn off the pain. It’s like when one of those burglar alarms starts ringing in the property next to ours and no one comes to switch it off. The noise can drive you nuts. But we don’t want to completely disable the system. Really we want to reset it so that it will sound the alarm again if there’s a new problem or the old problem gets worse.

Let’s say you have a broken leg. If medical science was able to target one set of pain receptors and switch them off, would that be a good thing? You might go from pain when moving to no pain. Except the pain is there to warn you if the way you are moving may cause more problems. If you suddenly have no pain, you might try walking as if there was nothing wrong and make the injury worse. In the general situation, having some pain is more useful than having no pain. The only time making all the pain go away is useful is when your condition is terminal. In such sad cases, there’s no point in retaining any of the pain warning system. Shutting it all down is the merciful thing to do.

For everyday living, Tramadol is the best compromise you can find. In cases of moderate to severe pain, it reduces the level of pain you feel. You should be able to go on with your life confident that, if you brush against something too hot, the pain will make you flinch away. Equally, if the pain surrounding the original site of injury grows worse, you know to get further medical help. Tramadol is the best way of managing pain.