Pills -

Doctors make a general distinction between acute pain from an injury that’s going to heal or disease that’s going to be cured, and chronic pain where you will be forced to deal with pain over a long period of time. So, for acute pain, all you need is a few pills and patience while the pain slowly fades away. Chronic pain should have a different approach but, for the following reasons, doctors prefer the pill bottle. If you look at the way the US healthcare service is organized, the basic motivation is making a profit. Because most patients carry some insurance, the strategy for doctors is to see as many patients in the day as possible so they can maximize the bill presented to the insurers for payment. In the good old days, a caring physician would take the time to get to know the patient and understand his or her needs. Now it’s straight to the business of writing out a prescription and calling for the next patient. Very few doctors ever take the time to investigate the underlying causes of the pain and find the best treatments because this takes time and time is money. Of course, the patients with the top-of-the-line insurance plans are covered. And the wealthy can afford to pay their own way to the best treatment. But the average citizen is on a conveyor belt to the fastest and easiest treatment which, by some strange coincidence, just happens to be a drug.

Why a coincidence? Because all the ads you see on television and in the newspapers and magazines, are paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. The corporations making the drugs are using hard-selling techniques to reinforce your dependence on pills as the primary form of treatment. That way, you go into your doctor’s clinic with the brand names of the relevant drugs on your lips. You are brainwashed into thinking the use of drugs should be the first response to all your problems. Why is this a problem? Because it’s turning the US into a country of addicts. Worse, as people continue to use many of the drugs, their tolerance increases and the effectiveness of the drugs declines. According to the National Centers for Health Statistics, approximately 75 million people in the US suffer some degree of chronic pain, i.e. pain giving them a poor quality of life. Agreeing, the American Pain Foundation offers a simple comparison. If you count up all the people who have cancer, strokes and heart disease every year, only a million or so die every year, but the pharmaceutical industry, hospitals and clinics devote vast amounts of time and money to offering treatments. Because there’s not the same amount of money to be made out of people suffering chronic pain, you are offered second-best service.

This is a political problem and, so far, there’s no sign the reform bills going through the House and Congress will deal with this. It all comes down to the priorities of how limited money is to be spent. On the one hand, you can be offered painkillers on a take-it-or-leave it basis. This is not so bad. Tramadol is an excellent drug and gives consistent relief from moderate to severe pain. Or you can be offered access to proper diagnosis and treatment. While we wait for a revolution, buy tramadol and find some relief from the pain of your condition.

To start us off, let’s take in a simple statistic. The National Institutes of Health currently estimates the US economy loses more than $100 billion per year on healthcare expenses, lost productivity and lost earnings caused by chronic pain. People in serious pain cannot go to work and take up time in the healthcare system. By a curious coincidence, the estimated cost of the healthcare reform currently working its way through the Washington mill is less than $100 billion per year. That’s why more than 75 millions Americans could do with a reversal of the current approach to pain. All the main lobbying power going into efforts to block reform supports the idea of maximum profit for minimum effort. That means doctors peddle pills as the first response treatment and discourage those in pain from seeking access to proper support services. OK, so just what are these “proper” support services?

Pain is a symptom of an underlying health problem. It can be an injury or the result of a disease. The first step is therefore a full diagnostic exercise to positively identify what is causing the pain. It’s no use trying to guess whether you do or do not have, say, a herniated disk. There are tests that can say definitively what the problem is and so point directly at the recommended treatment. In the case of a herniated disk, this would be a steroid injection and physical therapy. As with any service, it’s a case of matching resources and needs. Once you have a diagnosis, you can say whether a hospital should perform surgery or apply one of the other interventional procedures. Fully informed decisions can be made on which drugs to use and at what dosages. As it is, patients are left as a continuing experiment to try different drugs at different dosages and report back on pain levels. In appropriate cases, there can be reference to physical therapy or, sometimes more effective, psychological counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy and support services. All this before we get to the alternative therapies including acupuncture. Why all these different options? Because, people are complicated and do not fit into convenient treatment boxes. Everyone deserves to be treated as an individual with the right treatment given by the appropriate specialist.

Progress to persuade hospitals and clinics to set up pain management services is slow. These for-profit organizations do not believe they make a sufficient return on the cost of labor to justify creating a comprehensive department, bringing all the specialisms together. Change will only come when the politics of healthcare advances past the question of capitalism and makes the patient the center of attention. Until then, the best we can hope for is good medication. When it comes to the relief of moderate to severe pain, we are fortunate to have tramadol available. This is an opioid and so offers much the same level of relief as the opiates but with fewer adverse side effects. If you cannot prevail on your health insurance company to pay for “proper” pain management, you can console yourself with the best of the medications. Buy tramadol, write to your congressman and hope better days will come on the pain management front.

Obesity is a widely-popular problem that unites people from different nations and different countries. Over the past decades we have seen many articles and books about this disease and the ways of losing weight but most of it seemed to be useless as the obesity problem still exists in the world of today. Many doctors prescribe various pills and medications that are meant to hold the food-dependent adults away from it. Some of the obesity sufferers reach the peak of the illness. That is where they should take it as seriously as possible and treat it more as a sickness than a simple food dependency.

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God wants us to be happy. This is the first thought that should run through our head in the morning when we wake up. We were created to stay content and make others feel the same way if we able to make it happen. But life is difficult enough to always feel like that. For as long as we live we experience various emotions, we feel joy, we feel sadness, we feel bliss and we feel pain. Pain can take various forms. You can hurt your knee and experience pain, you can break-up with your soul mate and experience pain, your head can give you a headache and you might feel the pain in your back. Some of these traumas have a psychological background but the rest are related to health problems. Pain is always the reason to go and see a doctor, miss a day out of working schedule. We are so busy taking care of our life all the time that we forget that life is useless when it only brings you pain. Pain is something we are not able to control. Yes, we can go to see a doctor but this is a so-called “consequence”. Will we just go see a doctor on a daily basis just to check ourselves? Probably not.

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