Managing pain is an important part of women's health. Why? For one thing, women are typically prone to pain that men do not suffer. For instance, labor pains are never experienced by men, but many women are clear about their severity and duration. And even those women who do not have children usually experience menstruation every month. Although the experience of women varies widely with reference to menstruation pain or cramps, many women do suffer from painful menstrual cramps, each and every month.
Pain relief from such pain as menstrual cramping is typically handled by over-the-counter pain relief medications, such as aspirin, ibuprofen, etc. Midol is a brand-name medication that many women take for menstrual cramp relief. It is a well-known cramp remedy.
Some painful situations can be remedied by manipulating the body's physical structure. One example of this type of pain relief is chiropractic care. During a chiropractic adjustment, the doctor actually manipulates the patient's body to physically force the skeleton's bones back into proper alignment. This can be hard, particularly if the patient has been living with her body in an out-of-alignment situation for a long time. Because her musculature will have responded to this changed (and incorrect) alignment, her musculature will be trying to fight the chiropractor, and keep her alignment out. It can take several sessions or more before a long-standing condition of physical misalignment can be fixed and the patient brought back to good health.
Massage is another form of physical manipulation of a woman's body to try to bring the patient to a state of improved or better health. Massage can take many different forms, such as shiatsu, deep tissue massage, and neuro-musculature massage. Deep tissue massage, for instance, attempts to manipulate the deeper tissue connections in the body so as to bring them into more fortuitous relationship with the neighboring tissue and connective elements. Massage can vary widely in its health benefits, from the feel-good massage of a general massage practitioner, to the deeply felt and very effective work of deep tissue massage such as Rolfing.
When pain persists, women need to find more effective types of relief. This is when a health practitioner may prescribe some form of opiate. These types of drugs are very potent, and quite useful at numbing the pain receptors. They can make a horrible, life-debilitating painful condition become something that can be tolerated, at least enough to allow the patient to maintain a reasonable lifestyle.
The problem with this type of drug, of course, is that many people have become addicted to these opiate-based medications. This is a two-fold problem. First, the patient may find she becomes less effected by the drugs themselves. This is a typical problem with pain remedy -- they call it drug creep. Which means it begins to take more and more of a drug in order to give the patient the same amount or degree of pain relief that she first experienced when she started taking the medication. For instance, if it once too only one pill to give her relief, it can later require two pills to give her the same level of comfort. Second, now the patient is trying to manage a drug dependency on top of the condition for which she was originally taking the medication.
In general, it is best to seek the least intensive type of therapy or drug treatment that will be effective for the condition being suffered. For instance, if you can fix your leg cramps by stretching, it's best to stay with that form of leg cramps remedy before trying a course of prescribed medication.