What Your Patients Need to Know about Pain

THERE IS SOMETHING FRUSTRATING about talking to patients who take pain medications and believe in their heart that the drugs are doing them good. We see the advertisement for Alleve that show a woman with arthritis taking Alleve so she can have a better work out. Doctors, when prescribing NSAIDs, impart the idea that the drugs actually help the condition. Too often people in pain are given drugs to mask their symptoms, but are given the idea that healing is somehow being facilitated. The purpose of this paper is to give the practitioner a tool to teach patients.