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.

It might sound an odd way of starting off a discussion of pain, but could you solve a math problem if you didn’t know any math? Now we come to the point. If you had the right software on a piece of computer hardware, you wouldn’t need to know any math. You could just feed in the question and the answer would come out. Well that works great if you have the right software and the machine can give you the results you need. Hey, why did you need to solve the math problem in the first place? Was it for a class test? Does your school allow the use of math packages? Well, to avoid getting too complicated, let’s assume this is for some other purpose. Can you use the answer if you didn’t understand the question?

Now let’s switch words. Instead of math – a subject so unpleasant, only geeks like it – let’s talk about pain. What’s to understand? This is an unpleasant sensation and when it doesn’t stop, you take a pill. Well, yes, this may work well when the pain first starts, but is this the answer you want? You’re getting frustrated now. What’s to know or worry about if the pill makes the pain go away?

OK, we need to start again. One of the problems with most drugs is they work really well when you start taking them. Your body is surprised by the strange new chemicals in your blood and it does nothing to stop these chemicals from working their magic. But these chemicals are foreign invaders and your body’s auto immune system is designed to react when the blood is contaminated. Notice this is an automatic process. You can’t tell your body, “Hey, these chemicals are doing me good so don’t mess with them!” As time passes, you build up resistance. Doctors call this tolerance. No matter what the name, the effect is the same. The drugs slowly stop working. This leaves you with a choice. Either you increase the dose or you switch to a stronger drug or you find another way of dealing with the problem. Well, what’s the problem with just taking more pills? This can very quickly lead to dependence. As your body continuously adapts to these chemicals, you can find yourself trapped if you later want to stop. The withdrawal symptoms can be much worse than the original problem. Just as important, can you afford the cost of all these drugs over the years? Let’s assume $1 per pill and three pills a day. That’s $1,095 a year. Now start taking more pills or watch the retail price increase.

So there’s a place for Tramadol. For short-term pain relief, there’s nothing better on the market, even for severe pain. Equally important, it’s significantly less addictive than the opiate painkillers. At low doses, you can take Tramadol for quite long periods of time and still be able to stop without too many problems. But it’s far better to understand the questions posed by pain so that you can learn the answers without having to rely on a pill. Just as you cannot always rely on computer hardware to solve your math problems, you cannot always rely on drugs to solve your pain problems.

Arthritis is a very common health condition that is estimated to affect over 30 million people in US alone. There are dozens of different forms of arthritis that are manifested in different ways and have different causes. But in general arthritis describes a range of inflammatory and degenerative conditions that primarily affect joints and bones. It is commonly believed that arthritis is an age-related condition however there are different types of arthritis that can also affect children and younger adults. And the biggest problem about arthritis is it commonly caused chronic pain that seriously affects all activities of the person suffering from this health condition.

Chronic pain associated with arthritis is a serious problem because it can severely decrease the quality of life in the patient. Unlike acute pain that can be easily addressed in a short period of time and usually wears off in a gradual manner, chronic pain can be weaker in intensity yet persistent through time, causing discomfort for days, months and even years. It can vary in intensity but it’s always there so the patient also suffers from the psychological point of view because he or she knows that the pain will come back again and there’s nothing to do about it.

Fortunately, there are different pain management methods available for chronic pain relief these days. Arthritis patients are common to physical therapy that is often prescribed by rheumatologists for effective pain relief. Physical therapy can improve the condition of the area affected by arthritis and promote pain relief if applied repetitively. But it’s very important that the therapy is performed by a qualified specialist that knows how to address this sensitive condition correctly. Otherwise, there may be even an aggravation of pain if the therapy is performed by an incompetent therapist.

Another common form of arthritis pain relief that has become quite popular in the past couple of years is acupuncture. This ancient Chinese practice looks quite strange: small thin needles are applied to special spots all over the body. But in fact this technique was observed to be actually effective. Many arthritis patients who have undergone several sessions of acupuncture have reported that their pain has become less intense and their overall condition has improved. Specialists believe that it’s due to the increased production of natural painkillers, endorphins, in the body that is stimulated by needle application. But no matter how it is achieved it is also important that you address an experienced and competent acupuncture specialist for the most benefit.

And of course, there are oral pills that you can use for chronic pain relief. Apart from many common anti-inflammatory drugs that are prescribed to target arthritis there are also painkiller medications that you can easily use to make the condition easier. For example, the most popular painkiller in the US, Ultram, can be rather effective for chronic pain conditions. Only make sure that you take the special extended release form of Ultram that is designed for chronic pain relief, because with the normal form of this painkiller you won’t get relief for a long enough period of time. And discuss the use of Ultram with your doctor first to get a prescription.

The European approach to pain management depends on a formalized team approach. It’s never assumed one person knows enough to guarantee the right answer for every patient every time. This more open-minded approach makes the patient the focus of interest. If the patient has been complaining of pain and there’s no clear explanation for its cause or the most obvious treatments have already been tried without success, pain specialists will be called in.

The new team then reviews the diagnosis and treatment to date. This is not to find fault or blame anyone for past failures. Everyone wants to learn and avoid repeating mistakes. So the fresh pairs of eyes start again, question the initial assumptions, and look for alternate explanations for the current problems. If further tests will help this differential diagnosis, they are done. This may include further surgical procedures to collect biopsies or a wider range of scans to look for possible causes. Only when the team is satisfied all treatment options for the underlying causes have been exhausted, do they move on to a formal pain management strategy. In other words, they first try for a full cure and, only if that proves impossible, do they accept the pain as a permanent feature of the patient’s life and begin the process of managing that pain.

The team now excludes the physical specialists and brings in specialists in psychiatry, physical therapy, counseling, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). This recognizes the real nature of the problem. The patient must accept the reality of long-term pain. Without the guidance of a psychiatrist and the allied counselors and therapists, the prospect of persistent pain would be a source of depression. If you are the patient, you must be shown how to have a more positive view of life. This is not just theoretical. It starts with the physical limitations affecting life and plans how to cope more effectively. In the home, there may be a need to redesign the use of space to make it easier to move around and get things done. In the workplace, it’s often helpful to look at how the work is done and suggest new ways in which the tasks can be performed. Most employers are sympathetic so long as the smooth flow of work is not disturbed for one person. Now come the physical therapists. If you have lost muscle tone or should develop more strength in some movements, they will design a specific exercise program for you to follow. It’s often challenging to maintain commitment to these exercise routines but, if you are to make the best of your life with the new physical limits, you should stay positive and keep working. In most cases, patients report a real improvement in the quality of life.

This marks the difference with our experience with doctors, clinics and hospitals. No one has any time to sit down and talk with us about our problems. Everyone is on the clock to see a given number of patients in the hour. So we go in, we pick up out prescription for Tramadol and go home. It’s a tragedy. Although Tramadol is an excellent painkiller, there’s so much more that can be done, but we are denied access to any of it.

The role of doctors in our culture is very important. Because they can be useful in treating injuries and illnesses, they have become a profession. To ensure only the best people enter the profession, there are high educational standards to meet. The training is long and difficult. But, once doctors have qualified, they command respect. This is not just for the knowledge and experience they have collected. The power of the placebo effect also relies on believing the doctors actually know what they are doing. Remember, in all clinical trials, placebos are rated as highly effective by an average one-third of participants. If someone in a white coat gives you a pill in the right circumstances, you are likely to feel better even though the pill is made out of chalk. It’s all part of the magic of being a doctor.

The profession has also made big strides in shaping public opinion. The general practitioners used to be the gods. Now, thanks to television shows like House, it’s the surgeons in the top hospitals. Not that any of them are like House, you understand. But many do feel they can do what they want. So they develop reputations for their skills and build empires inside their hospitals. This grows their income and protects them. Why? Because once a patient is allocated to a particular empire, it holds on to that patient. That means the empire gets the credit for all the fee income earned and, if anything goes wrong, no one outside the empire gets to hear about it.

In other countries where they practise socialized medicine, there’s a team approach to treatment. Instead of one doctor having a monopoly on controlling treatment, the patient becomes the focus of interest for a group of healthcare professionals representing a range of relevant knowledge and skills. There are regular meetings where groups of people discuss how best to treat the individual. Collective decisions are taken. Why is this better? Well, suppose a patient comes in and reports pain. The first doctor diagnoses the problem and begins treatment. Some time later, the patient is still complaining of pain. In our system, the first doctor might fear loss of reputation if he or she calls for a second opinion, so simply prescribes more painkillers. If the pain persists, the dosage of the painkillers is increased or stronger drugs are used. The result is our country has the highest consumption of prescribed medications in the world. We’ve been persuaded the best treatment always comes in a pill bottle. In other countries, doctors and other healthcare professional work hard to avoid prescribing drugs. This not only cuts down the long-term cost of treatment, but also tends to produce better results.

None of this takes anything away from Tramadol. Indeed, if you travel round the world, the drug is widely available for treating moderate to severe pain. Although the brand names can differ from country to country, the basic chemistry is recognized as highly effective. But outside the US, you will find Tramadol is prescribed as part of a wider range of treatments to manage the pain. Indeed, the aim is to enable you to have a good quality of life without having to depend on any drug.