healthy living

Perhaps we should not find good in the Europeans. After all, they have death camp hospitals where doctors decide who lives and dies. At least, this is how the more excitable GOP politicians seem to think other democratic countries work. Quite why any government could survive ten minutes if its doctors were systematically killing people off is not explained. It is simply assumed all socialist systems are dangerous to the health of those who live there. That these myths survive is proof, if you needed it, that ideas can have a powerful and long-lasting effect on people. Put another way, if you believe in something strongly enough and make it a part of your life, your belief often comes true.

In medicine, an early problem facing researchers when designing clinical trials was the so-called placebo effect. It has long been recognized that people who believe strongly enough in the cure will often be cured. So we need to start off with a definition. A placebo is a chemically inert substance or liquid that can have no effect on the human body. In a clinical trial, people are randomly assigned to one of two groups. One gets the real drug. The other gets the placebo. But there is no way anyone can know which is which. So a doctor in a white coat gives you encouragement, a smile and the “medicine”. The volunteers then describe how they feel.

Consistently, about one-third of participants report feeling better after taking the placebo. No matter what the researchers have done to eliminate the placebo effect, all they have succeeded in doing is produce a mountain of evidence that people who expect a treatment to work feel better. So, if you run a practice, a clinic or hospital, you can make a third of your patients feel better if you manage their expectations well. Physicians dress and act the part, listening carefully, carefully examining, ordering tests where appropriate, and then prescribing something that will “do the trick”. Even if this something is chemically inert, it will be an effective treatment in at least one-third of cases. Continue reading →

Well, pain accompanies most of human beeings and we all know what can cause it and how it feels. . There’s a condition however when the person affected feels no painful sensations called pathological analgesia.. But normally pain is something inevitableThe questoipn is if there was no pain at all would the world be a better and happier place?

No is the answer. The world without pain can be a rather young but an empty world without much humans living in it. Pain beeing a strongest caution signal we have in our body help us evaluate any malfunctions, problems and therats to our lives. Statistics show that most of those rare persons who are born without the ability to feel pain live no longer than their teen age… Feeling pain due to different reasons makes us take some measures. Otherwise we could easily die of a little cut, supercooling or inflammation.. So the world couldn’t simply be the same if we feel no pain..

Pain is complex in it snature, and there are a numer of view ob it.. Physiologically the senstions of pain results nervous receptors triggered. Nervous receptors are responsible both touch and pain. If thr feeling of touch is replaced by a more severe impact (extreme heat, cold, inflammation, mechanical hit) the nervous system got a stronger signals and the brain interpret s such discomfort as pain. Continue reading →

Let’s start off with a few simple propositions. Pain is just an extension of touch. We feel some levels of pressure represent pleasure or are merely acceptable. If the pressure becomes uncomfortable, we are immediately alerted. If the discomfort turns into pain, we are motivated to take action. So the gradations of touch into pain are a necessary part of the bodily process allowing us to avoid injury in our dangerous modern environment. Sadly, we do not have the means to switch off pain selectively. We continue to feel some pain unless the drugs literally induce unconsciousness. This is reality. There’s no sense in trying to deceive ourselves. So the big question is how we organize our lives to live a satisfying life with continuing pain?

This is not what you want to hear. The marketers who aim to sell you the range of drugs produced by the pharmaceutical industry have been brainwashing you for decades. They want you to believe there’s a pill to cure all your ills. Except that has always been a lie. Although some drugs are very effective for a time, all drugs slowly lose their effectiveness as the body adapts to them. This leaves you with the choice of giving up the drugs or increasing the dosage and risking dependence. In fact, we have millions of people addicted to prescription drugs. The majority could not stop without experiencing unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Continue reading →

Ultram is one of the most popular medications used for pain management these days. It is considered as the most commonly prescribed painkiller medication in the US these days and there are several reasons for such a vast popularity this drug enjoys among doctors and patients. The main benefit Ultram delivers is it’s universal effectiveness in what concerns pain relief. It doesn’t really matter what causes he pain because Ultram doesn’t affect the source of pain signals but rather blocks them from being interpreted by the brain and experienced as ordinary pain. That’s how all opioid analgesics work and before you start using Ultram it is highly recommended that you learn more about opioid painkillers first. Continue reading →

There’s a rumor going round the town that pain is a bad thing and should be eliminated at all costs. Big Boss Pharma has been lining up all its big guns and, no matter what level of pain you may be experiencing, there’s a pill with your name on it, assuming you get a prescription, of course. You may therefore look at the headline here and be a little surprised. How on Earth can anyone think pain is a good thing? Well, let’s go back to basics. Darwin, that inconvenient man who thinks we all evolved rather than were created, argued only the best-adapted species survived. When it comes to survival, the animal needs to know when it’s under attack. If it’s injured, it decides whether to fight or flee. So pain is a vital signal to the brain. It warns when the body is injured. We benefitted from that when we were less well-developed. Today, it’s still useful to know if we have accidentally injured ourselves or just picked up something too hot to hold.

The modern response is to seek medical assistance and then we complain when the pain message continues. So let’s move medical science a few years into the future. Rather in the same way we can switch off the burglar alarm when we know someone has broken into our home, a researcher develops a magic pill to switch off pain. It changes the brain’s chemistry so we are no longer aware of any pain. Would you take it? Before you rush to an answer, the scientist confirms this is an all or nothing pill. Either you feel pain or you do not. We will have to go into real science fiction to arrive at a treatment that only switches off the pain messages from the injured part of the body. In theory, it should be possible to neutralize the pain by interrupting the nervous system at key junctions, e.g. where an arm or leg joins the body. Unfortunately, this also risks paralyzing the arm or leg. Continue reading →