Health and Wellness

At one time or another, everyone suffers from some degree of muscle pain. This is where your muscles are sore and ache. It can be from an injury. People hurt themselves by lifting heavy objects or have work requiring the overuse of certain groups of muscles. Some types of sport quite often involve injury. Equally, the pain can come from stress. Perhaps less obviously, muscles often ache as a symptom of other problems in your body. If you have an infection and a high fever, muscles can be affected. But, most often, there is a strain or damage to tendons or ligaments, or some other injury to the soft tissue of the body. Given this range of causes for pain, there is no fixed set of treatments. It is always for your healthcare professional to fit the best treatment to the injury or disorder you have. That said, the range of potential treatments fall into convenient groups.

We start with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. These are for less serious problems and have two effects: the reduction of pain and of inflammation. Because they are not addictive, they are usually available over-the-counter in a variety of different formats, e,g, as tablets, liquids, topical creams, sprays, and so on. But, if the degree of pain is in the range of moderate to severe, a stronger analgesic is required. Although the injury or damage to the muscles will heal so long as you rest and stay reasonably still, a more powerful painkiller helps to keep you comfortable. However, one word of warning is appropriate. Just because a painkiller is effective does not mean you can immediate resume mobility. All the drug does is to stop the pain message reaching your brain. It does not heal the injury. You have to wait for nature to take its course. Except, of course, gentle physical therapy and the use of heat and ice packs can speed the process. If the ligament or tendon is torn, surgery may be required. Effective medical intervention to treat the underlying cause of the pain is always required. Because muscle pain can be associated with anxiety, stress-related and depressive disorders, it is often appropriate to prescribe the relevant drugs to control the anxiety, relieve the stress and reduce the depression. You should not feel ashamed that the muscles may be a symptom of a mental disorder. The more important emotion is confidence the treatment will be effective to relieve the pain.

Finally, we come the the different classes of drugs used to control seizures and convulsions, and to relax muscles. Ignoring the muscle pain that can follow a seizure, we are now in the world of barbiturates, benzodiazepines, and so on which act on the central nervous system. Because they depress the nervous system, they inevitably relax muscles but, because of their side effects, it is not always wise to take them unless the threat of seizures is great. Drugs like skelaxin are not used in the treatment of seizures as such although their sedative effect is to relax the major groups of muscles. Skelaxin is used in combination with a combination of rest, physical therapy and other treatments designed to treat the underlying physical muscular disorder. Depending on the precise medical problem, it may be combined with any of the classes of drugs mentioned earlier in the article.