If you or your beloved one has ever undergone a surgery or a medical operation, you may have noticed that the doctors prescribe a large bag of pain medication afterward.
Even though surgery is done after making the patient fall asleep, so they don’t feel the pain, the fact remains that after they are done with the surgery, there might still be pain after the patient wakes up.
To counter this issue, doctors usually add painkillers to the list of medicine you should take. Here are some reasons why painkillers aren’t really the best for you:
Painkillers can get addictive
Painkillers are popularly known to be addictive, and there are many cases of people who have become addicted to painkillers. Yes, painkillers in a small quantity are good, but if one takes them on a daily basis, they will get hurt.
Painkiller addiction is real, and a very dangerous thing.
Painkillers get less effective over time
The more you use painkillers, the more your body will eventually get used to this numb feeling, and the less the strength of each pill will be.
You will eventually feel like no amounts of pills are enough to cure the pain you’re feeling. This can cause addiction. And if you suddenly try to stop taking painkillers, your body will react in a way it usually does when you stop taking actual drugs.
Painkillers can also harm a body’s endocrine system, and the hormonal system of the body severely.
To counter these issues that have arisen with pain prescriptions, doctors have banded together to decide to reduce the pain prescriptions up to a certain amount, where the patients won’t feel a difference.
According to a study that is published in the New England Journal of Medicine in Michigan across 43 hospitals, surgeons were able to reduce one third of the prescribed pills to their patients and there were still no dissatisfaction reports or increase in the pain in the patient’s body.
Some people might raise concern that decreasing the amount of narcotics can make their beloved ones feel more pain, but that isn’t the case.
As discussed earlier, painkillers get less effective over time. This is because the more you take painkillers, the less your body will try to keep up with the effects.
In the Michigan “experiment”, surgeons reduced the amount of painkiller pills prescribed to their patients by up to eight, for several medical procedures and still see good results.
This “experiment” also apparently proved that taking less painkillers meant that the patient will eventually start taking lesser on their own too.
This practice is soon to be adopted by medical facilities all over the United States, and hopefully, will make it outside the country as well. Over dosage is a very dangerous side effect to healthy people who come in for a surgery to make them better, not worse.
Some surgeons still say that these reductions are not enough, and that more research should be done on finding the appropriate amount of painkillers that will get a person through the pain without getting addicted to that feeling or the pill.