Archive for October, 2008

Sleep yourself better

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Although the first thought when the pain starts is to take Ultram, an equally urgent problem is the need to get a good night’s sleep. When you have a fairly constant level of pain, sleep is the first thing to suffer. Sleep does not come until you are too exhausted to care any more. To make the best recovery, you have to remain as positive as possible no matter what the world throws at you. Sleep is essential in this. If you’re walking around feeling like one of the living dead, you’ll feel less positive. That means taking drugs on top of the painkillers to help you sleep properly. Once you’ve established a better sleep routine, you can move on to the next step which is learning how to live your life within the new limits imposed by the pain. There will be a short-term role for sleeping pills to restore your strength of purpose. Now, with Ultram to help you through the first steps, it’s back to the drawing board to relearn how to move around with the least pain. So what are you waiting for? Start with Ultram now!

Doctors effort to cope

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

It’s a sad fact of life that not enough doctors are coming through their training and entering general practice. This makes pain controversial. How much time does it take to distinguish between the genuine patients who need drugs like tramadol to get a better quality of life, and the drug abusers who want to get high or the dealers looking for product to sell on the streets.

The majority reject the longer hours and poor pay in favor of the high status and better paid work in hospitals. The result is towns and cities find themselves without primary healthcare, an accelerating problem as older doctors retire. Those practitioners who remain find time in short supply. When one patient walks through the door for a consultation, tens more wait outside. The best that they can do is to react to the symptoms described by their patients.

That means a quick prescription of tramadol instead of a more holistic approach. In a perfect world, the physician would look at the patient as a person losing mobility, under threat at work because the lifting and carrying is too difficult, friendships and marriage under pressure because this is all too stressful to manage. As it is, there is a single irony. The few doctors struggle to cope because so many people are in pain and need help.Patients come to doctors because they cannot cope.

What do the Chinese know that we don’t?

Monday, October 13th, 2008

One of the oldest medical treatments in the world is acupuncture. Whereas the West relies on painkillers like Ultram to get results, TCM adopts a holistic approach to heal the whole person. As one of the cornerstones of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practised for several thousand years, it works by stimulating specific points in the body using thin needles. It’s applied to relieve pain arising from a wide number of causes and it has the key advantage that, unlike western medications, it has no adverse side effects so long as it is delivered by a trained professional.

So far, the use of painkillers continues as the norm. But, as an alternative to or alongside physical therapy, there is an increasing acceptance of TCM by Americans. With the right practitioner to give you confidence, acupuncture is worth serious consideration.

In the U.S. the FDA regulates the needles and specifies the manufacturing standards to be applied to produce sterile, non-toxic products. In fact, millions of people in the U.S. use acupuncture and the FDA has almost no reports of problems other than those arising from the failure of sterilization procedures.