Find a Pain Management Option That Fits Your Level of Pain

Have you ever been in a doctor’s office where they had a cute little pain chart for you to look at? No matter what your age, the doctor will point to the smiley face chart and ask what your pain level is.

The chart typically goes from a scale of 1 (no pain) to 10 (worst pain imaginable). The smiley face loses its smile as you go up the chart, until you see a red-faced icon with tears streaming down its face.

You need to first diagnose how bad your pain is. You don’t want to be getting surgery for a mild pain, and you don’t want to try treating yourself with a single dose of Aleve or Tylenol if you’ve just been hit by a car.

Frequency is an important part of your pain management strategy. Whichever option you choose, make sure that using it too often won’t actually hinder your ability to manage your pain.

Using headaches as an example, sometimes you can actually cause your own headaches because you overmedicate. Medication overuse headaches are technically known as an analgesic rebound headaches.

Track how often you use headache medicine. Is it more than twice a week? If so, you could be doing more harm than good by taking headache medicine. Not only can the frequency increase, but also the amount of pain that you have and the length it lasts.

If this happens, you have to rely less on headache medicine and more on other pain management strategies. It might feel hard to do at first but then you’ll actually suffer less intense and less frequent headaches.

Non-interfering relief is important to consider when working on a pain management strategy. You’ll often see certain pain relievers with warnings, like you might get drowsy, you shouldn’t operate machinery (like a car), etc.

If you’re dealing with frequent or chronic pain, and you have to work and stay alert, you don’t want to be out of it 24/7. In fact, even if you’re home, you don’t want to sleep your life away, so find a management tool that lets you remain active and alert if possible.

Sometimes age will factor into the equation. You never want to give a young child or even a teen a dose of pain reliever that isn’t fitting for them. And even with elderly individuals, sometimes some medications aren’t suited for them – or they may interact with other medicines negatively, so you have to be careful.

Safety with other medical conditions is important. It’s not just the medications, it’s the conditions themselves. You need to make sure that if you have any kind of medical condition, you ask your doctor if a particular pain management medication is okay for you to take.

For example, let’s say you have asthma, ulcers, or a liver or kidney disorder. You might not want to take even a simple over the counter aspirin like Excedrin because it’s not good for people with those conditions.