WHO definition of Traditional Medicine

Traditional medicine includes diverse health practices, approaches, knowledge and beliefs incorporating plant, animal and/or mineral based medicines, spiritual therapies, manual techniques and exercises, applied singularly or in combination to maintain well-being, as well as to treat, diagnose or prevent illness.

Veda Aid Solutions for Daily Aches and Pain

Definition

In Ayurveda, the cause of persistent is caused by the imbalance of the natural forces (physical, mental or spiritual) within ones body that may be amplified into severe chronic pain if left un-checked. If pain can be defined as a highly unpleasant, individualized experience of one of the body's defense mechanisms indicating an injury or problem, pain management encompasses all interventions used to understand and ease pain, and, if possible, to alleviate the cause of the pain. Chronic pain is a major health problem. Pain not only impairs the ability to function and reduce the quality of life for millions of people, but also forms the basis for substantial socioeconomic costs. Worldwide the adult population is in need of treatment due to persistent pain. Despite intensive efforts, clinical pain control has remained a difficult target, and available drugs are frequently ineffective in providing adequate pain relief.

Realization

Realizing that pain is only an indicator of the bodys imbalance with the natural world and relates directly with the enviornment we live in. What the body consumes, the physical activity and the thoughts carried are all relative to maintaining a pain free healthy body.All these elements exert an influence or energy that can displace our natural bodys rhythm causing illness. Unchecked imbalances can develop in ailments and sickness and pain is one of the indicators that something is wrong.

RESEARCH PAPERS

Purpose

Pain serves to alert a person to potential or actual damage to the body. The definition for damage is quite broad: pain can arise from injury as well as disease. After the message is received and interpreted, further pain can be counterproductive. Pain can have a negative impact on a person's quality of life and impede recovery from illness or injury, thus contributing to escalating health care costs. Unrelieved pain can become a syndrome in its own right and cause a downward spiral in a person's health and outlook. Managing pain properly facilitates recovery, prevents additional health complications, and improves an individual's quality of life.

Yet, the experiencing of pain is a completely unique occurrence for each person, a complex combination of several factors other than the pain itself. It is influenced by:

Ethnic and cultural values: In some cultures, tolerating pain is related to showing strength and endurance. In others, it is considered punishment for misdeeds.

Age: This refers to the concept that grownups never cry.

Anxiety and stress: This is related to being in a strange, fearful place such as a hospital, and the fear of the unknown consequences of the pain and the condition causing it, which can all combined to make pain feel more severe. For patients being treated for pain, knowing the duration of activity of an analgesic leads to anxiety about the return of pain when the drug wears off. This anxiety can make the pain more severe.

Fatigue and depression: It is known that pain in itself can actually cause depression. Fatigue from lack of sleep or the illness itself also contribute to depressed feelings.

Precautions

The perception of pain is an individual experience. Health care providers play an important role in understanding their patients' pain. All too often, both physicians and nurses have been found to incorrectly assess the severity of pain. A study reported in the Journal of Advanced Nursing evaluated nurses' perceptions of a select group of white American and Mexican-American women patients' pain following gallbladder surgery. Objective assessments of each patient's pain showed little difference between the perceived severities for each group. Yet, the nurses involved in the study consistently rated all patients' pain as less than the patients reported, and with equal consistency, believed that better-educated women born in the United States were suffering more than less-educated Mexican-American women. Nurses from a northern European background were more apt to minimize the severity of pain than nurses from eastern and southern Europe or Africa. The study indicated how health care staff, and especially nursing staff, need to be aware of how their own background and experience contributes to how they perceive a person's pain.

In a 1990 study reported in the journal Pain, nurses were found to overestimate the severity of pain in patients with severe burns. In most other studies, nurses and physicians ascribe a lower pain severity than do patients.

Description

Before considering pain management, a review of pain definitions and mechanisms may be useful. Pain is the means by which the peripheral nervous system (PNS) warns the central nervous system (CNS) of injury or potential injury to the body. The CNS comprises the brain and spinal cord, and the PNS is composed of the nerves that stem from and lead into the CNS. PNS includes all nerves throughout the body, except the brain and spinal cord. Pain is sometimes categorized by its site of origin, either crustaceous (originating in the skin of subcutaneous tissue, such as a shaving nick or paper cut), deep somatic pain (arising from bone, ligaments and tendons, nerves, or veins and arteries), or visceral (appearing as a result of stimulation of pain receptor nerves around organs such as the brain, lungs, or those in the abdomen).

A pain message is transmitted to the CNS by special PNS nerve cells called nociceptors, which are distributed throughout the body and respond to different stimuli depending on their location. For example, nociceptors that extend from the skin are stimulated by sensations such as pressure, temperature, and chemical changes.

When a nociceptor is stimulated, neurotransmitters are released within the cell. Neurotransmitters are chemicals found within the nervous system that facilitate nerve cell communication. The nociceptor transmits its signal to nerve cells within the spinal cord, which conveys the pain message to the thalamus, a specific region in the brain.

Once the brain has received and processed the pain message and coordinated an appropriate response, pain has served its purpose. The body uses natural painkillers, called endorphins, to derail further pain messages from the same source. However, these natural painkillers may not adequately dampen a continuing pain message. Also, depending on how the brain has processed the pain information, certain hormones such as prostaglandin's may be released. These hormones enhance the pain message and play a role in immune system responses to injury, such as inflammation. Certain neurotransmitters, especially substance P and calcitonin gene-related peptide, actively enhance the pain message at the injury site and within the spinal cord.

Pain is generally divided into two additional categories: acute and chronic. Nociceptive pain, or the pain that is transmitted by nociceptors, is typically called acute pain. This kind of pain is associated with injury, headaches, disease, and many other conditions. Response to acute pain is made by the sympathetic nervous system (the nerves responsible for the fight-or-flight response of the body). It normally resolves once the condition that precipitated it is resolved.

Following some disorders, pain does not resolve. Even after healing or a cure has been achieved, the brain continues to perceive pain. In this situation, the pain may be considered chronic. Chronic pain is within the province of the parasympathetic nervous system, and the changeover occurs as the body attempts to adapt to the pain. The time limit used to define chronic pain typically ranges from three to six months, although some health care professionals prefer a more flexible definition, and consider chronic pain as pain that endures beyond a normal healing time. The pain associated with cancer; persistent and degenerative conditions; and neuropathy, or nerve damage, is included in the chronic category. Also, unremitting pain that lacks an identifiable physical cause such as the majority of cases of low back pain may be considered chronic. The underlying biochemistry of chronic pain appears to be different from regular nociceptive pain.

It has been hypothesized that uninterrupted and unrelenting pain can induce changes in the spinal cord. In the past, severing a nerve's connection to the CNS has treated intractable pain. However, the lack of any sensory information being relayed by that nerve can cause pain transmission in the spinal cord to go into overdrive, as evidenced by the phantom limb pain experienced by amputees. Evidence is accumulating that unrelenting pain or the complete lack of nerve signals increases the number of pain receptors in the spinal cord. Nerve cells in the spinal cord may also begin secreting pain-amplifying neurotransmitters independent of actual pain signals from the body. Immune chemicals, primarily cytokines, may play a prominent role in such changes.

Managing pain

Considering the different causes and types of pain, as well as its nature and intensity, management can require an interdisciplinary approach. The elements of this approach include treating the underlying cause of pain, pharmacological and non-pharmacological therapies, and some invasive (surgical) procedures.

Treating the cause of pain underpins the idea of managing it. Injuries are repaired, diseases are diagnosed, and certain encounters with pain can be anticipated and treated prophylactically (by prevention). However, there are no guarantees of immediate relief from pain. Recovery can be impeded by pain and quality of life can be damaged. Therefore, pharmacological and other therapies have developed over time to address these aspects of disease and injury.

PHARMACOLOGICAL OPTIONS

General guidelines developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) have been developed for pain management. These guidelines operate upon the following three-step ladder approach:

Mild pain is alleviated with acetaminophen or a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID). NSAIDs and acetaminophen are available as over-the-counter and prescription medications, and are frequently the initial pharmacological treatment for pain. These drugs can also be used as adjuncts to the other drug therapies that might require a doctor's prescription. NSAIDs include aspirin, ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil, Nuprin), naproxen sodium (Aleve), and ketoprofen (Orudis KT). These drugs are used to treat pain from inflammation and work by blocking production of pain-enhancing neurotransmitters. Acetaminophen is also effective against pain, but its ability to reduce inflammation is limited. NSAIDs and acetaminophen are effective for most forms of acute (sharp, but of a short duration) pain.

Mild to moderate pain is eased with a milder opioid medication, plus acetaminophen or NSAIDs. Opioids are both actual opiate drugs such as morphine and codeine, and synthetic drugs based on the structure of opium. This drug class includes drugs such as oxy-codon, methadone, and meperidine (Demerol). They provide pain relief by binding to specific opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord.

Moderate to severe pain is treated with stronger opioid drugs, plus acetaminophen or NSAIDs. Morphine is sometimes referred to as the gold standard of palliative care as it is not expensive, can be given by starting with smaller doses and gradually increased, and is highly effective over a long period of time. It can also be given by a number of different routes, including by mouth, rectally, or by injection.

Although antidepressant drugs were developed to treat depression, it has been discovered that they are also effective in combating chronic headaches, cancer pain, and pain associated with nerve damage. Antidepressants that have been shown to have analgesic (pain-reducing) properties include amitriptyline (Elavil), trazodone (Desyrel), and imipramine (Tofranil). Anticonvulsant drugs share a similar background with antidepressants. Developed to treat epilepsy, anticonvulsants were found to relieve pain as well. Drugs such as phenytoin (Dilantin) and carbamazepine (Tegretol) are prescribed to treat the pain associated with nerve damage.

Close monitoring of the effects of pain medications is required in order to assure that adequate amounts of medication are given to produce the desired pain relief. When a person is comfortable with a certain dosage of medication, oncologists typically convert to a long-acting version of that medication. Transdermal fentanyl patches (Duragesic) are a common example of a long-acting opioid drug often used for cancer pain management. A patch containing the drug is applied to the skin and continues to deliver the drug to the person for typically three days. Pumps are also available that provide an opioid medication upon demand when the person is experiencing pain. By pressing a button, they can release a set dose of medication into an intravenous solution or an implanted catheter. Another mode of administration involves implanted catheters that deliver pain medication directly to the spinal cord. Because these pumps offer the patient some degree of control over the amount of analgesic administered, the system, commonly called patient controlled analgesia (PCA), reduces the level of anxiety about availability of pain medication. Delivering drugs in this way can reduce side effects and increase the effectiveness of the drug. Research is underway to develop toxic substances that act selectively on nerve cells that carry pain messages to the brain. These substances would kill the selected cells and thus stop transmission of the pain message.

NON-PHARMACOLOGICAL OPTIONS.

Pain treatment options that do not use drugs are often used as adjuncts to, rather than replacements for, drug therapy. One of the benefits of non-drug therapies is that an individual can take a more active stance against pain. Relaxation techniques such as yoga and meditation are used to focus the brain elsewhere than on the pain, decrease muscle tension, and reduce stress. Tension and stress can also be reduced through biofeedback, in which an individual consciously attempts to modify skin temperature, muscle tension, blood pressure, and heart rate.

The broad, long-term objective of the research in our laboratory is to explore mechanisms responsible for the generation and maintenance of chronic pain. The mission is to create a better understanding of central nervous system mechanisms that lead to persistent pain. This includes pain due to inflammation, cancer and nerve injury, and ultimately the goal is to identify novel targets for the development of alternative pain therapeutics.

One noteworthy advance in the field is the insight that not only neurons, but also spinal non-neuronal cells, such as microglia and astrocytes, are involved in the regulation of pain signaling. Current work in our research labratories are focused on creating unique natural formulations based on natural micro-molecules to relieve 'Daily Aches and Pain'.

Neck Pain
Back Pain
Shoulder Pain
Arm, Wrist & Hand Pain
Chest Pain
Abdominal Pain
Leg, Ankle & Foot Pain