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Archive for February, 2010

“He who feels it, knows it.” Is a common saying, immortalized in music by the late Bob Marley, that clearly shows pain as a subjective phenomenon.

Let us take a quick look at pain, the one symptom that we all wish to avoid if we possibly can. Why do we have so much aversion to pain? It is the one thing that constantly reminds us of our mortality. Most people do not mind getting old but they do mind the aches and pains that attend aging. We must understand however that pain is one of the body’s most useful signals when things are about to go wrong or, God forbid, have already gone horribly wrong. The body uses pain as a call to order as well as a call to arms. As pain hits, the body is mobilising all of its considerable resources to reverse the cause of the pain and at the same time calls your attention to the possibility of diminishing supplies of nutrients required for repair or replacement of damaged tissue or to an activity that is about to cause damage.

We are all familiar with the warning systems in a car. When a car ignition is turned on a plethora of red lights flash up but as soon as the engine kicks in the red lights go out one by one as a system check is carried out and each unit is passed fit. If a unit is unfit, its amoxil online red light stays on and it then becomes the responsibility of the driver to find a solution to the highlighted problem. The body has a similar set up. It is constantly carrying out systems checks and when it finds a system not up to par it flashes up a red light – pain.

Pain is unpleasant. It is a sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Pain may be acute or chronic in nature. There is a great difference between the two. Pain calls attention to a situation that is life threatening or may become so if care is not taken. At the time pain hits the damage may not have happened yet and the signal is an attempt to avoid damage.

Acute pain, for the most part, results from inflammation and generally comes on suddenly, for example, after trauma or surgery. The cause of acute pain can usually be diagnosed and treated, for example, an injury that results in a broken bone. Acute pain is confined to a period of time and severity while chronic pain persists over a long period of time and is mostly resistant to medical treatments.

Pain is a unique symptom that changes from one person to another. It is whatever the sufferer experiencing it says it is because it is 90% perception. Acute pain may sometimes be stopped by treating the underlying cause. However, if the underlying cause is “untreatable” the pain may become chronic, causing stress, anxiety and fear.

Chronic pain is often associated with a long-term or life-threatening illness. A person experiencing chronic pain may be depressed, withdrawn, and exhausted. It is easier to understand pain, locate its cause, and treat it by using physiological explanations for it. This way, pain can be divided into two types, Nociceptive or Neuropathic. Nociceptive pain can be somatic or visceral. Somatic pain results from injury to parts of the body like bones, joints, and soft tissues. Visceral pain comes from inflammation, distension, or stretching of internal organs. It is not well localized and is often described as an aching, cramping, deep, or pressure pain.

Examples of visceral pain would include pain in the abdomen from a bowel obstruction and pain that shoots up the left arm/jaw from an acute myocardial infarction. Neuropathic pain results from injury to nerves in the central or peripheral nervous system. Injury to the brain, brain tumors, diabetic neuropathy (nerve damage due to the effects of diabetes), and herpes zoster are all examples of buy amoxil conditions that may cause this type of pain. Neuropathic pain is usually more difficult to treat than nociceptive pain.

Everyone experiences pain at some point. Each person is the best judge of his or her own pain. Feelings of pain can range from mild and occasional to severe and constant. Labour or childbirth pain may be mild and last just a moment, or it may be severe and last for several minutes. In most cases, acute pain does not last longer than six months and usually disappears when the underlying cause of pain has been dealt with. If acute pain does not find relief it may lead to chronic pain. Pain signals could remain active in the nervous system for weeks, months, or even years. Effects of unrelenting pain signals include tense muscles, limited mobility, lack of energy, and possible changes in appetite.

When you first experience pain, it gets your attention and prompts you to take action to prevent a worsening of the condition or anything that aggravates the pain. The pain sometimes prompts a visit to the doctor. Pain interrupts our work, recreation, and relationship with members of the family.  But is gobbling up pain killers the answer to the problem?

Finding comfort, which most of the time translates to being pain free, is one of your goals when you are sick and is usually one of the cardinal goals of the doctor who is treating you for an illness. However, this writer believes that this is self defeating. The main focus should be locating the cause of the pain. Once the cause of your pain is found and proper treatment instituted the pain disappears. In that instance, it has served the useful function of pointing you in the direction of the injury or illness and further damage is averted.

If pain comes from an “incurable” illness, for which no immediate solution can be found, the pain could become harmful. This type of pain would keep you from normal activity which saps your strength. The intensity of the signals would seem to increase because the brain becomes more sensitive to the pain. So your pain feels worse even though the injury or illness may not be getting any worse.

When you consult a doctor, your goal is to be cured. That should mean that you want the cause of your pain to be found and removed so that you can resume normal life without the necessity for further visits to doctor. Unfortunately, many illnesses do not have simple solutions. Doubly unfortunately doctors have been so geared towards treating symptoms of diseases like pain that it might require a huge paradigm shift for them to start looking at finding causes rather than simply treating symptoms.

Pain killers only block the appreciation of pain, but do nothing to remove the cause of it. To make matters worse, a lot of the pain killers now in use are addictive and/or create a problem of having to wean patients off them when the cause of the pain is eventually found and removed. In the treatment of chronic pain, the goal is to live as normally as possible. In this respect, treating chronic pain is similar to managing diabetes or high blood pressure. If you need to be on pain medicine for a considerable time you should not desist from finding the cause of the pain and making every effort to remove it. Therein lays finding health because treating the pain symptom may mean allowing the underlying damage to continue and become even worse.

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Every six minutes someone dies from a heart attack. Current statistics show that around 2.5 million people in the UK are living with coronary heart disease and every year about 146,000 people suffer a heart attack. 33% of the people who have a heart attack die even before reaching the hospital. Heart disease is also the number one cause of death in the United States, killing more than 630,000 people a year.

It is vital therefore to know the early warning signs of a heart attack and call emergency services or go into the emergency department once you first notice them. Saving a life in the case of a heart attack must start with the patient picking up on the warning signs immediately and quickly summoning help. Someone who suspects they may be having a heart attack should never drive themselves to hospital! Most ambulance response times are less than 10 minutes in urban areas, and paramedics can start treatment immediately.

A heart attack occurs when the blood supply to the heart muscle is suddenly blocked. If a large amount of the heart muscle is injured because of this, it can weaken the heart’s function as a pump, ultimately leading to heart failure and possibly death.

What then are the symptoms of a heart attack? The common symptoms include:

1. Crushing central chest pain or amoxil clavulin pressure
2. Shortness of breath or excessive sweating
3. Tightness in the chest
4. Sudden unexplained increase in heart beat
5. Sudden dizziness or brief loss of consciousness
6. Indigestion or gas-like pain
7. Dizziness, nausea or vomiting
8. Unexplained weakness or fatigue
9. Discomfort or pain between shoulder blades
10. Recurring chest order amoxil discomfort
11. Anxiety or a sense of impending doom.
12. Chest pain spreading to the shoulders, neck or arm. The pain may be mild to intense. It may feel like pressure, tightness, burning, or heavy weight. It may be located in the chest, upper abdomen, neck, jaw, or inside the arms or shoulders.

Not all these signs occur in every case. Remember also that these symptoms may go away and return. If you notice one or more of these signs in yourself or another person, don’t hesitate. Call 999 immediately and get to a hospital emergency department. It’s important to repeat that a person experiencing these symptoms should never drive themselves to a hospital. A person should never self diagnose themselves either. Doing this can put their lives in danger and waste valuable time. Hospitals use state of the art instruments and tools designed specially to support the diagnosis of a heart attack so one should never self-diagnose.

One of the best ways to prevent heart disease is to exercise, shed excessive weight, avoid smoking and/or excessive alcohol, maintain a healthy blood pressure, control diabetes and reduce your cholesterol level.

Please make sure you don’t decimate your cholesterol. If your cholesterol level is too low, it may be as dangerous, if not more, than having it too high. Increasing your fibre intake may be one of the best ways of controlling cholesterol as the fibre prevents the re-absorption of cholesterol from the intestine. The liver would produce more if needed.

Finally, be watchful. Eat a healthy diet supported with colourful fruits and vegetable and work your body. You are not meant to be a couch potato.

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