Natural Pain Management Tips

Pain is a fact of life that many thousands of people all over the world live with every day of their lives. For many who are in chronic (long-term) pain, this means that it is something they have to live with every waking moment of every day, which is likely to make life very miserable indeed.

The fact is that all of us, probably every single individual on the face of planet earth is either already familiar with pain or will have episodes of pain at some point in our lives yet to materialize. Does this therefore mean that we have to accept pain as an inevitable fact of life?

The unfortunate answer to the question is probably yes because unless you live in a cotton-wool lined cocoon for every moment of every day, it is almost impossible to avoid the kind of accidents that inevitably cause pain and discomfort. However, in a situation like this, the pain is usually temporary and no matter how acute it might be at the time, it passes fairly quickly.

If you trap your finger in the door or smack yourself on the back of the hand with a hammer, yes, it hurts like the devil and the pain will be excruciatingly intense, of that there is no doubt. If you fall off your bike and crack your knee off the concrete, it hurts and even getting an unintentional kick or smack playing sports does not hurt any less because your opponent didn’t mean to cause you pain.

However, by definition, acute pain of this type usually passes and whilst trapping your finger in the door or falling off your bike can leave an injury that hurts for a few days, it is nevertheless still a relatively temporary pain situation that you are in. But these are also times when pain relief is something that you will probably seek, because the basic truth is that mankind in general is not very good at dealing with pain without some kind of external intervention.

If you have a finger or knee that is sore for several days, imagine how much worse it must be if you had to live with constant chronic pain, pain that nags at you each and every day of your life. If you are one of the fortunate ones who has never had to put up with long term pain, it is probably hard to imagine a situation where pain is a constant in your life but there are thousands of people for whom this represents their everyday reality.

Of course, over the course of the past 112 years since Felix Hoffman managed to produce a stable form of acetylsalicylic acid, better known as aspirin, man has developed many chemical-based painkillers that are used by millions all over the world each and every day.

Many of these drugs are pretty effective as painkillers but this does not change the fact that, as with all chemical-based pharmaceuticals, there are potential side effects attached to many of these drugs.

There are also quite significant numbers of people who cannot take these drugs too, people who are either allergic to them or are taking other medicines which prohibit them from taking particular types of painkillers. For example, for thousands of people all over the world who take a daily anticoagulant tablet like warfarin sodium or heparin, aspirin is a definite no-go as it too has the ability to thin the blood.

Thus, whilst not denying the effectiveness of painkilling drugs, there are a perhaps surprisingly large number of people who cannot use chemical-based painkillers. In addition, there are many thousands of people who do not want to use chemical-based analgesics (painkiller) because they understand that medical science is not perfect, and that whilst the majority of side effects of most commonly used painkillers are known, there may well be side effects that have not yet been discovered.

There are therefore a lot of people who are looking for natural ways of dealing with pain for one reason or another.