Kids Health Blog

A Brief History of Painkillers

As long as there has been man, there has been pain. And as long as there has been civilization, probably even before Mesopotamian culture, there have been painkillers. Humans have turned to prayer, sacrifice, spiritualism, and folk medicine, as well as herbal remedies, tonics, and poultices. Long before the alchemists of Europe, China was practicing the traditional medicine that many trust in still today.

One of the most popular painkillers today, opioids have been used in medicine for literally thousands of years – in the form of opium.

In the 19th Century, medicine had a revolution of sorts. Whereas before people blamed sin, demons, and imbalances of bile for pain and illness, the discover of microscopic organisms like bacteria and even viruses expanded human understanding of illness and pain. Quickly, truly effective treatments for pain began to develop.

The New Old Guard of Painkillers

Aspirin may be the oldest of modern painkillers. It is thought that the ancient Greeks used a form of aspirin called salicin as early as the 5th Century BC. Aspirin came into modern scientific use in 1829. acetaminophen (Tylenol), the other most popular over-the-counter painkiller, was developed in 1893.

Fifty or so years later, ibuprofen – used in Motrin, Advil, and Naproxen – was discovered. However, none of these painkillers had established the hold on the market that they have today. Instead, opiates like morphine, opium, and heroin had the masses under their control. For a time, there was a serious epidemic of addiction in the United States as opiates were widely available through mail order catalogs – even Sears sold them! Of course, it is still a problem today, but less so.

The Need for Another

America was still a growing superpower with a large industrial and mining workforce, but with a burgeoning service industry that offered plenty of desk-jobs in the new economy. Factory workers suffered from manual labor, miners had awful injuries and physical afflictions, and desk workers were developing severe back pain conditions from sitting all day long.

Pharmaceutical companies were pushing to create a better, less addictive alternative to existing painkillers derived from opium – the ones that were causing all the addiction issues. It was not until 1977 that the answer was born.

Tramadol Debuts, Ultram a Success

The first incarnation to emerge successfully from necessity was tramadol, which became an immediate hit. Today, of course, we know that tramadol is the generic form of Ultram – one of the most widely used and effective analgesics for people with moderate to moderately severe pain. Then, though, tramadol was new and alien sounding. Despite people’s reservations, it began to be copied and used across the world in a firestorm of popularity, because it was so effective at relieving pain and had minimal side effects and risk of addiction.

It has been around for 60 years now, and is still growing in popularity. Every year, new uses are discovered. The future is bright for this drug and the patients who benefit from it. Ultram has long been used to treat various types of chronic pain, including back, neck, and joint pain. It is now used for all sorts of injuries, surgeries, and conditions, including Restless Leg Syndrome, withdrawal, fibromyalgia, diabetic neuropathy, migraine headaches, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and premature ejaculation.

The world should be an honest and reliable place so you can trust labels and the advertising that goes with it. Take the word “clinic” as an example. This should mean a smaller community medical establishment, run by qualified medical specialists. It will offer some inpatient care but mainly focus on outpatient care, usually concentrating on a particular medical condition, e.g. family planning or pain. So far so good. Obviously, hospitals also set up small units which are called clinics and, out in the countryside where hospitals can be a long way off, clinics represent the only local resource for all aspects of medical care. Except the word has become a cloak of respectability for the so-called pill mills, clinics that give doctors a bad name.

The accepted definition of a pill mill is a place where prescription drugs are sold, often at reduced prices for non-medical reasons. Put another way, they sell narcotics and so fuel drug abuse in the neighborhood. If these were legitimate, they would actually be providing a useful service to the community by undercutting the retail prices charged by local pharmacies. So often the people in the poorer parts of town find even the routine drugs unaffordable from local drugstores. But the sad reality is that these “clinics” abuse the prescription system and give drugs away like candy. The most usual label is as a “pain management clinic”. If true, this would be a benefit. Unfortunately, these places open, trade in cash for a few weeks or months, and then close before enforcement action closes in. Although you will find examples of this phenomenon in most large cities, the main concentration has been discovered in Florida and Texas.

You can always tell whether you are in a legitimate clinic. The law requires doctors to identify a real medical problem before drugs can be prescribed. So if a clinic offers you drugs without giving you any kind of medical exam and there’s a long line of people queuing, you are probably in one of the illegals. Just so you understand the scale of the problem, the abuse or overdose of prescription drugs is now the second most common cause of accidental death after traffic accidents. Although might think more people would die from the street drugs like heroin and meth, the FDA approved painkillers are the real killers.

So Florida has now imposed a moratorium on new clinics and is looking for ways in which to bring the problem under control. This does not change the real need for genuine pain management clinics, i.e. places which specialize in treating pain rather than the underlying physical problem causing it. As it is, people are either forced into self-medicating using Tramadol, or they are left to be treated by the doctors claiming the responsibility for the underlying physical cause. So you might have arthritis and be left to see the same doctor without any outside help. This not to deny the effectiveness of Tramadol or the more powerful painkillers. But it ignores all the alternative approaches to pain management (in the real medical sense of the words).