Pain Relievers

Any unpleasant sensation that a person experiences within his or her body is regarded as pain. Though pain is an entirely subjective and personal experience that involves complex inter-relationships between the mind and body, it is the most common symptom for which patients seek medical attention. In addition, pain may also be considered a protection mechanism alerting an individual to some malfunction in the body.

Drugs used to relieve pain are often called analgesics. A mild analgesic is a chemical substance that relieves muscle, joint, and minor headache pain, usually without producing drowsiness or interfering with mental alertness. It is often treated as non-prescriptive medications (over-the-counter drugs). The three most widely used mild analgesics are aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen. Generally, these drugs are mainly used as the treatment to:

(1) Decrease pain (analgesic properties)

(2) Lower body temperature (antipyretic properties)

(3) Reduce inflammation (anti-inflammatory properties)

Besides mild analgesic medications, there are also strong analgesic drugs available for the treatment of moderate to severe pain arising for post surgical trauma or the chronic, severe, intractable pain of terminal illness. These strong analgesics are known as narcotic analgesics, which are both and analgesic (pain-relieving) and a sedative (sleep inducing).

The most important family of narcotic analgesics is the opiates, which contain the major pain-reliving agent obtained from the opium poppy plant. Two well-known painkillers, morphine and codeine, which are the compounds in the crude extract of opium, are obtained from this plant.

Morphine acts by blocking the process in the brain that interprets pain signals coming from the peripheral nervous system. Codeine produces less sedation and depression of the central nervous system and thus is commonly added to prescriptive cough syrups to decrease throat discomfort. Though these two drugs are effective in pain reliving, they are very addictive if the intake of these drugs is frequent.