How do pain reliever medicines work?

in #science6 years ago

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We often suffer from different types of body pain like headache, earache, headache, back pain, neck pain, muscle pain, abdominal and many more. What do we do to get relief from these pains? We generally take pain killers to relieve the pain. But what pain relievers do inside the body. Common people never think about it. When they feel pain they simply go to medicine shop and take pain relievers. Today we will try to know about it.

There are two types of pain relievers that are often used to reduce the pain. These are ibuprofen and acetaminophen. Both medicines are available in three forms – liquid, chewable and pill. Once you ingest them, they start functioning and the pain gets reduced soon. 

In fact when we take pain reliever, it doesn’t reach the place where you feel so much pain. Instead of going the spot, it starts working with the body organs that make you feel the pain. Those organs are brain, body cells, nervous system and nerve endings. There are uncountable nerve endings in our body that can feel the pain when any section of our body gets hurt. Our body cells exhibit chemicals named prostaglandins when they are smashed due to some reasons. 

When the nerves endings come in contact with prostaglandins, they convey the injury messages about the spot where the cells are damaged to the brain.  Once the brain gets the messages it tries to identify the extent of the hurt and pain.  When we take a pain killer pill, it stops the releasing of prostaglandins so that the damaged cells couldn’t respond to it and prevent the messages reaching the brain. If brain doesn’t get the message of hurt, you experience no pain. 

These medicines are good for less severe pain. But during surgery, patients need stronger pain reliever than ibuprofen and acetaminophen. These types of pain reliever medicines prevent your cells communicating with each other. Thus they couldn’t convey the pain or injury messages to each other. In this condition, the brain also doesn’t get any pain messages and therefore the person couldn’t feel the pain. 

Source: https://kidshealth.org/en/kids/ibupro.html

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This is totally new for me. Great information. Never knew that pain reduction is due to lack of communication between brain and the injured.

Thank you. Common people never focus on these things.

Interesting you found this on Kidshealth.org

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