Health tips for better life

No matter who you are, there is one constant. Everyone is afraid of real pain. What makes the fear strong is knowledge. If you have no choice. You get caught in an accident. The unexpected arrival of pain is something to deal with. Once the shock wears off, it is there and you cope as best you can. But if you are scheduled for major surgery, you know this caring doctor is going to cut you open, mess with your insides. You cannot help it. You are worried about how severe the pain is going to be after the operation. Although you read that pharmaceutical companies have produced better painkillers, that hospitals have become more caring places, that doctors and nurses are better trained, it is natural to be worried. So is fear justified?

There are a number of studies to guide us through this discussion. The first general thread tells us that people whose pain is controlled tend to recover more quickly and have fewer complications after surgery. To some extent, this is a psychological issue. If the pain is under control, you start moving around and rebuilding your body’s strength. You can focus on getting better. But if the pain is strong enough to make breathing difficult, then any kind of activity will be impossible. Muscle tone will be lost over time and healing will be delayed. So pain management is a balancing act. If you are only pain-free when full of drugs, you will not move around. If you are in too much pain, you will not move for fear of making the pain worse.

The most powerful response to pain is intravenous medication. The drugs drip through a catheter into your body alongside fluids. For short periods of time, the opiates and opioids can reduce even the most severe pain to a dull ache. Many hospitals allow patients some degree of control over when the drugs are administered. This empowers you and helps the mind cope with the pain. There are also techniques for reducing pain in particular parts of the body. These involve the use of an epidural or spinal anesthesia to deliver painkillers into the spinal chord, and nerve blocks to prevent pain messages from traveling through the nervous system to the brain.

The problems with all these approaches is that people come out of surgery and start taking pain medication from scratch. That is why the latest research suggests the better approach is to start taking the painkillers two days before surgery. This allows your body to build up a stable level of the active chemicals in your blood stream before the surgeon cuts you open. The research actually confirms that the use of a less powerful painkiller such as tramadol hcl is as effective as the more powerful drugs taken after the surgery. Think of it as being like preparing to play football. You strap on all that body armor before going out on to the field and letting strong people knock you around. Taking tramadol before surgery is like protecting yourself against the pain. There is also the advantage that people are less afraid. People who go into the operating theater believing they will come out feeling pain turn the experience into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Taking trusted painkillers before surgery means less stress and faster recovery.

The US healthcare system is often torn between conflicting forces. On a professional level, doctors are supposed to place the interests of their patients first. So, it is reasonable for the profession to respond to a shortage of proper pain management facilities in the hospital sector by establishing “pain clinics”. In theory, these clinics will provide short-term care with mixed teams of doctors, physical and psychological therapists, and nursing professionals able to counsel and advise people on how to manage their pain. Unfortunately, the medical profession is strongly for profit. It would be good if there was a major stream of altruism running through the modern ranks of healthcare professionals. Unfortunately, an increasing number of doctors are abandoning general practice in favor of employed status in clinics and hospitals. This gives stability of earning with the least possible work commitment. It also enables the management to run their facilities to generate the most income from the lowest cost base. Thus, the reality of many pain clinics is they are “pill mills”, i.e. their main function is to supply people with every possible painkiller with the least possible time spent in expensive face-to-face contact between doctors and the people. Such clinics are characterized by long queues of people waiting to see a doctor to collect prescriptions. Doctors are on a quota target to see a minimum number of patients every day. This maximizes the claims to the health insurers by the volume of people seen. For those not on a health plan, it is a cheap consult system since no treatment is involved.

This is not to deny that some clinics are attempts to offer a professional service to those in genuine need. But such beacons of light are few and far between. How do we know this? Because there is an explosion in the number of pain clinics opening across America. In some areas, the local government is trying to control the problem. At least, there are political calls for the profession to rein in these fast prescription services. At best, there are local bans on the approval of new clinics. Sadly, the lobbying power of the medical profession means there are very few state-wide limits either on the establishment of clinics or on the practice of writing prescriptions for hundreds of pills at a time. Some local politicians are proposing ordinances to prohibit clinics from prescribing pain medication except in emergency situations and then only offering a 72-hour refill, expecting the individuals to return to their regular doctors for proper care. Their chances of being able to control the problem are slim without the support of state governments and the medical profession.

This is a tragic situation. There is a real need for professional pain management services at both a local and county level. Unfortunately, the medical profession is exploiting the public and feeding their growing addiction to pain medications. People, being practical, take pain relief in whatever form is available. If that means endless supplies of drugs, they take it. The best practice standards in other countries with public healthcare services does provide mixed teams of pain management specialists who focus on training people to cope using only low level painkillers. For example, they are allowed to buy tramadol. Because the higher labor costs are absorbed by the taxpayers, a significantly better service results. Because tramadol is not habit-forming to the same degree as more powerful drugs, this is a safer system for managing pain.

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.