Acute Pain.Com

Controlling pain by sheer will power surely is a wonderful thing, but unfortunately a gift no given to most of us. So usually pain very perseveringly demands to be treated.

We all know that treatment of pain by getting rid of its causes is the best way, but it is not always possible and especially it does not always work fast enough. Half of the patients in US consultation rooms come for the treatment of pain, and no part of pharmacology is better researched than pain treatment.

But we have to differentiate between several forms of pharmacological pain management:

Anesthesia describes the suppression of all kinds of sensations including pain by inducing a state of reduced awareness. If this reduction is complete and pharmacologic we speak of general anesthesia.

Local anesthesia can either be achieved by certain drugs that are locally applied – the classical case being the injections of a dentist – or by acupuncture or hypnosis and even combinations of two or all three of these techniques.

In all cases anesthesia is a procedure of invasive medicine and reserved for the clinical practitioner and thus not a part of our own treatment of regular pain.

This treatment is called analgesia. The body produces its own painkillers with the very same effect. They are called endorphins. These endorphins are emitted to reduce pain after the brain first allowed it to be registered. Unlike under anesthesia, under analgesia consciousness and awareness are not directly altered or affected. The same applies to endorphins. So basically analgesia does nothing else but reinforcing the bodies own endorphin emissions.

There are several fundamentally different types of analgesic drugs though, which we will describe on the following pages.