Should You Take Pain Medication?

Let’s face it; pain is the worst. Whether it’s a traumatic injury, surgery or dealing with a chronic back injury, spending your day in pain can take the joy out of life and rob you of doing the things you want to do.

And yet, pain has a purpose. First of all, it can signal cellular damage or death. This may occur with a bone fracture, tendon rupture, torn muscle, chronic arthritis or damage from surgery. Your pain needs attention. However, pain might also be telling you not to use your affected body part. In some instances, such as a broken bone, that message comes in loud and clear.

The problem with pain is that it presents a dilemma on how best to heal from conditions that cause you pain. On the one hand, it’s difficult to heal if you’re in significant pain. In fact, untreated pain can delay healing by slowing down circulation throughout the injured tissue, causing a decrease in oxygenation necessary for healing. Scientists have even documented that the greater pain a patient has after surgery, the slower their surgical wound tends to heal.

So, it would seem that the way to speed up healing is to treat, as in medicate, your pain. This is true for severe and acute pain, but it’s not as simple as that when it comes to less severe and chronic pain. Scientists are finding that in many cases, the medications that you take to manage your pain do nothing to speed up your healing, and may in fact cause some harm.

Let’s start with NSAIDs, which are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory meds that are commonly used for all kinds of pain, especially pain that is chronic. Common examples include, Ibuprofen, Naproxen and Aspirin. NSAIDs are a kind of drug that blocks your body’s ability to synthesize a hormone like substance called prostaglandin. Prostaglandin has an effect on many of your body’s functions, such as inflammation, pain, and it even helps release the uterine lining during your period by causing uterine contractions (as a result, NSAIDs are really effective to relieve menstrual cramping). A major function of NSAIDs is to block inflammation by slowing the production of prostaglandin. However, the first stage of the healing process is inflammation, and when inflammation is blocked, your ability to heal is slowed down. Inflammation is actually an important process in your body.

A second problem with using NSAIDs is that it blocks pain, which may sound like a good thing, but it also masks any symptoms that you may be having. It’s complicit in hiding the fact that there is damage and that maybe you shouldn’t be using that injured part of your body. When those pain signals are hidden, you may end up causing further damage by pushing your injury too soon.

NSAIDs are also tough on your stomach. They can erode the lining of your stomach and cause ulcers. A deadly side effect of long-term use of this class of medications is that they can cause gastrointestinal bleeding.

Corticosteroids are often used to reduce pain and inflammation in the hope that it will promote healing. Common examples, include cortisone, hydrocortisone and prednisone. However, these medications, most notably prednisone, actually interfere with healing and increase your risk for osteoporosis, infections, diabetes and obesity. When corticosteroids, commonly shortened to cortisone, are injected, they may help reduce pain and inflammation, but they cause tissue destruction. In fact, most doctors limit the number of times an injury can be injected to two or three.

When it comes to treating pain, nothing can beat the effectiveness of opioids. But that effectiveness can come at an incredibly high cost. Common examples include, morphine, heroin, codeine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and fentanyl. Opioids are addictive, and with the easy availability of these drugs, a crisis of addiction has spread throughout the US and Canada, claiming tens of thousands of lives each year. And opioids slow wound healing and make patients more pain sensitive, increasing the risk for their pain to become chronic. The problem with opioids is the opposite of NSAIDs. Where NSAIDs decrease inflammation, opioids actually increase inflammation. These medications, specifically morphine, produce pro-inflammatory compounds that increase your pain in the long run, setting patients up for chronic pain and addiction. Furthermore, the side effects of opioids include severe constipation, mental impairment and slow respiration, which can be fatal.

A common belief is that pain medications are the road to speedy healing. And while it’s true that it’s hard to heal when you’re in severe pain, these medications don’t often speed up your recovery, and in many cases, they slow things down. The question then becomes, is there anything that reduces pain and speeds up healing? And the answer is yes.

Drug-Free Pain Control that Promotes Healing

While medicating acute and severe pain is often necessary, dealing with chronic pain presents some difficult choices. However, when making choices about how to manage your pain, it’s important to know that there are some very effective ways to manage pain that are drug-free—and many promote healing at the same time. Among them:

• Acupuncture. It may seem like inserting hair thin needles into your body wouldn’t have much effect, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Actually, an acupuncture treatment triggers a number of physiological changes, all of which are beneficial. Acupuncture promotes movement through the inflammatory cycle. It boosts the circulation of feel-good neurotransmitters and it sparks your body’s own natural opioid system into action, which reduces pain. In addition, acupuncture increases circulation to the injured area, bringing the nutrients and growth factors necessary for healing.
• Cold Laser Therapy. Also called low level laser therapy, cold laser uses red and infrared light emitted from a low-intensity laser. During this painless therapy, the light penetrates deeply into your affected tissues, which triggers biochemical changes in the cells. It helps to repair tissue damage and triggers the affected cells to heal and regenerate. Cold laser therapy not only speeds up healing, but it also relieves pain and it can be used for a wide variety of conditions.

• Shockwave Therapy. This is a treatment modality that involves pulsed acoustic (sound) waves. It combines high pressure followed by negative pressure to create waves. When Shockwave therapy is used on a targeted area, it actually speeds up healing by stimulating cellular turnover, breaking down scar tissue and encouraging better circulation—all of which regenerate and heal damaged tissue. Shockwave therapy can be used to relieve pain and promote healing of muscle, tendon, ligament and joint conditions.

• Tui Na. A little like massage, Tui Na is a hands-on therapy based on the theories of Chinese medicine. Tui Na uses specific methods, such as pushing, pulling, rolling, pressure and stretching, and it’s focused on the points and pathways that make up the acupuncture meridians. Researchers have found that Tui Na is especially effective in reducing pain in chronic back and neck conditions, as well as in other musculoskeletal issues.
• Gua Sha. This is a technique that involves scraping the skin over an injured area with a smooth-edged tool. Scraping the skin in this way causes petechiae, which are round, red patches on your skin caused by mild bleeding under the surface. This redness is a kind of microtrauma, which your body mobilizes to heal by bringing increased blood flow and healing growth factors to the area. Researchers have also found that Gua Sha is useful in treating musculoskeletal pain, by increasing circulation, reducing toxins in the area and relieving pain.
• Cupping. Cupping has been used throughout Asia for thousands of years, and it’s a common therapy in Chinese medicine. A cupping treatment involves placing cups on a treatment area in which a vacuum has been introduced, through a small flame, pump or by pinching or squeezing a soft silicone cup. The suction produced creates a pulling effect, which acts a bit like a reverse massage. Cupping is used to promote healing and reduce pain. Like Gua Sha, cupping also produces mild bleeding under the skin, which contributes to the healing effect.
• Food Therapy / Nutrition. In Chinese medicine, food is considered to be medicine that you eat several times a day. Most acupuncture practitioners are well-schooled in treating with foods specific to their patients’ needs. While food therapy can’t relieve pain in a day or even in a week, your diet can be tailored to address specific diagnoses that may be promoting or aggravating your pain, as well as to reduce inflammation.
• Heat Therapy. Heat is frequently used to promote healing and reduce pain in Chinese medicine. It causes your blood vessels to open up, bringing healing nutrients to the injured area, as well as reducing muscle tightness and spasticity. In ancient times, healers created heat by burning the herb mugwort, a practice called moxibustion. However, today most practitioners use far-infrared lamps that produce a kind of heat that penetrates deeply into the injured area.

While it may seem like a tall order to want therapies that reduce your pain and promote healing, it’s clear that there are a number of good choices that are supported by science. If you’re struggling with chronic pain and would like to know more about how I can help, please contact me today.

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