Pain Relief – How To Handle It

Pain is a sensory and often emotional experience as a result of damage to a part or parts of the body. At the moment while pain can actually be measured, it ca only be experienced by the person to whom it affects. Medicine now has a special department that deals with pain relief called pain management and its importance within health care continues to grow as more long term health issues arise over the years that leave the patient in often continual distress.

While some pain experienced can be eliminated by medication, under the guidance of trained physicians, other types prove to be difficult and standard medication does not always work. The situation with acute pain for example is one where once the underlying problem has been successfully treated, the pain will normally be easy to relieve. A harder type of pain to manage is chronic pain as it can be difficult to locate or diagnose but common reasons are nerve damage, referred pain and cancer.

In these situations the pain may be considered to be a symptom of the disease or condition that is being treated and will be looked at as a separate item. Owing to the nature of pain relief, it has been necessary to bring together professionals from different medical areas to work together for a broader approach.

Pain relief can also involve psychological measures that involve biofeedback, cognitive therapy or the use of meditation and relaxation through yoga. Some pain that is suffered by patients is the result of a trauma that has been treated although the pain remains which is an extremely frustrating situation for the person and one where the condition is treated independently from the original cause.

Pain management practitioners are generally experts from various fields within medicine for example psychiatrists, anesthesiologists, neurologists and psychiatrists. A number of these come from areas where the use of drugs is used to help provide pain relief. This pain management team uses the special skills of professionals who will try interventional techniques to control pain.

Pain relief methods using pain management teams is a growing area of medicine and closely watched around the world. Pain management is found to be the central focus in the treatment of diseases, like cancer, tumors, serious accidents and long term illnesses. The responsibility for long term pain relief is also being given to the patients who will need training in how to manage their pain in the future.

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Muscle Relaxants

A common medication prescription given for back pain is for muscle relaxants.  Muscle relaxants work well when your muscles are so tense they cause back pain.  What I didn’t realize is that science doesn’t know for sure how muscle relaxants work on the muscles.  They just know they can calm your nerves and make your brain send nice messages to your muscles instead of tense messages. 

The problem with muscle relaxants is they can be addicting if you take them too long.  In essence they make you feel good and who doesn’t like feeling good?  If your back pain has been due to tense muscles causing muscle spasms, the muscle relaxants can help you learn to relax long enough for the muscles to calm down.  But you shouldn’t take this medication for longer than 2 or 3 weeks.  They don’t “cure” anything and you should learn to relax without drugs.  Muscle relaxants are just a way to get some temporary relief.

Kill Pain with a Trigger Point Injection

One of the treatments for back pain is called a trigger point injection.  A trigger point injection is where anesthetic is injected into muscles to relieve back pain.  There can be more than one injection administered at a time.    The point of the anesthetic is to deaden the area surrounding the point where the pain seems to generate.

Another type of injection is the facet injection.  The facet joint is where two vertebrae meet and the joint enables you to use your spine for motion.  The facet injection usually is a steroid, but it can be an anesthetic too like the trigger point injection.  The difference is the facet injection is done on an outpatient basis using fluoroscopy.  Fluoroscopy enables the physician to watch where the injection is reaching in the joint.  You can only get temporary relief from pain of course.  Both injections are just treatments and not cures.

Inversion Table for pain relief

If you have back pain and want to try something that will make it feel better, test a back pain inversion table. The table is easy to use and can be purchased for use at home. Basically it’s a tilting table.  You lie on it with your feet under a support so you don’t slide off.  Then you tilt the table as far as you want.  You don’t actually hang upside down, but it will tilt quite a ways.

The principle behind the table is the same principle as traction.  The point is to use something to pull the vertebrae in the back apart.  When you’re in traction, some kind of equipment is used to apply tension to your spine.  The inversion tables uses gravity.  The table only provides temporary relief though.  It’s not a long term solution to back pain.  But if it helps for even a little while, it’s worth a try if you have chronic or remittent pain.