Whoever you ask, they will all tell you the same thing. Everyone knows pain is a warning signal. It’s telling you there’s something wrong with your body and you should get it fixed. That’s conventional wisdom and it’s right. Except, what are you supposed to do when you have received the message and have done what you can to treat the cause? You no longer need the warning message. But you can’t just switch it off. It’s not like an alarm that goes off when you have a break-in at your home. The burglar runs off. You’re safe again. You switch off the alarm. With pain, you have to decide how you’re going to respond. Some people decide that changing their lifestyle to slow down, to become more inactive, keeps the level of pain down. Go back twenty years and the medical profession would have been advising rest. Now, research has proved the opposite to be the better approach. The new wisdom is that slowing down contributes to chronic pain.

Today’s message is that exercise is good for you even if you feel pain when you do it. This seems counterintuitive. Why does it work? The reasons flow from inactivity. If you do little more than sit and eat, your muscles lose their tone and cholesterol levels rise putting diabetes into your risk profile. Blood pressure also rises and, unless you do something, there can be a stroke or heart attack. Inactivity means it’s harder to maintain a regular sleep cycle. Stress and anxiety levels increase and a depression can form. But start an exercise program devised by your physician and the opposite is true. Your general strength and energy levels improve. Burning off unwanted calories improves your weight which takes some of the pressure off your joints. Now work through stretching and other exercises to improve flexibility and your cartilage problems are eased.

This is not going to be easy. But if you build up activity levels slowly, this gives your body a chance to adjust. Using a good painkiller like tramadol will also give you a breathing space if your body protests too much. It’s worth repeating the need to get an exercise program designed for your particular health problems. You need exercise targeted on improving performance in the areas most affected by injury or disease. Throughout, using tramadol will help keep the pain within reasonable limits but, as time passes, the need to rely on an analgesic should slowly recede. Buy tramadol and use it sparingly. Just as you should not give into the pain, you should also avoid any risk of dependence on a painkiller.