keeping in good health is the reason we decided to let you learn about how pain medication works than generally pick how medicine works in our bodies.
Most times when we get sick we are often given medicine to treat a certain disease and pain relief medicine is added at times to relieve pain associated with a disease or at times we just go a to a pharmacy and pick the best over the counter pain reliever we know to treat some chronic pain we have.
Table of Contents
What are pain killers?
Pain killers or pain relievers are drugs used for treating body pain, inflammation, and aches.
They can be grouped into levels of pain medication, from strong to weak based on the severity of the pain being treated, which may be long term, chronic or acute.
Pain medication can further be grouped into:
Non-opioid like paracetamol.
Opioids Like codeine, tramadol.
NSAIDs (Non-Steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs). eg aspirin and ibuprofen.
So how does pain medication work in our bodies
Pain killers like paracetamol work by altering nerve endings messages sent to the brain or cutting them off completely so you won’t even notice or feel anything like your arm bleeding until someone tells you.
The nerve endings in our bodies send messages to the brain informing it of injuries on our bodies that have occurred or inform it of pain on a certain body part so that we respond to it and stop the pain. The alteration of the messages can take place in the brain, the spinal cord or at the injured place.
The fact that the brain has been affected in the way it’s supposed to work by not receiving or interpreting messages from sensory nerves about a certain pain on our bodies is another way of saying you have become partially numb.
So paracetamol knows where the pain is in your body after being absorbed into your bloodstream through digestion by cutting off messages by neuron cells from being transported to the brain about a pain in the body.
It does not stop the pain but reduces it so you do not feel it as strong as it was before the medication and when the medication wears off you will again feel the pain until the pain cause is treated.
Pain killers can be addictive
Pain relievers are very addictive in that they end up being abused even through prescription, some people can take an overdose. And one of the causes is the constant prescription being written every now and then.
Your body reaches a time when it can only depend on pain killers to relieve pain and you personally cannot do anything unless you take the drug something that the body would have fixed on its own had you not got it accustomed.
The wrongly used prescriptions impact your brain systems that most addictive drugs do impact like heroin leading to some dependency
Signs that you could be addicted to pain medication
- Not taking drugs as prescribed and you end up taking larger doses, taking less and saving them for later use.
- Not taking the drugs for the reason it was prescribed for. And being dishonest about what the drug was used for.
- So before you affect your body’s sensory nerves you should learn the difference between tolerance, addiction, and dependence or in relation to your body basing on how you are using them
How can you treat your body without pain relievers or NSAIDs
These steps would make your body stronger in fending its self off from pain other than wait for you to take drugs to help it fix a pain especially as a result of dependency,
The ability to push on through the pain.
Pushing your body on during discomfort only makes it better, after all, what doesn’t kill it makes it stronger. And after a good while, it will get better at fixing the pain or becoming resistant to it naturally.
The meals you take have.
Definitely, having a good diet has an influence on how the body reacts to injury or disease and we can only say eat a balanced diet because the cause of the pain can come from any part of the body that may be unattended to in your diet.
Be positive
Having positive thinking about pain has shown in some instances the ability for the body to heal its self by sending messages to the brain and release chemicals responsible for helping heal an injury, our thoughts directly influence some of our body functions and reactions.
DO NOT IGNORE THE PAIN
Pain is a warning that something is wrong on or in your body and it needs a fix as soon as possible.
Its like a shoe with a worn-out sole,if you start feeling the stones as you walk then it means its time to buy new shoes because if you insist on using the old ones, soon or later you are going to step on a rusty nail and it will just go through your shoe sole and pierce your foot which would be worse and could only have been prevented by not ignoring the pain caused by the stones.
well that was today’s lesson, about how pain killers work in your body and hope you have learned something useful today
