Informative Essay On Painkillers

As he comes off the field, an athlete notices he has a subtle pain in his shoulder. Determined to finish out the season strong, he takes two tablets of aspirin in hopes of healing the beginnings of an injury. What the athlete does not know about the painkillers could affect him later down the road, especially if he upholds his mentality of constantly taking aspirin whenever he senses an injury in the making. Painkillers are drugs that simply mask the pain many people suffer from on a daily basis. Globally, humans are using painkillers to cope with pains ranging from headaches to arthritis inflammation. Although painkillers offer many benefits, society has become too dependent on these instantaneous cures. When asked what invention they could not live without, twice as many people answered aspirin rather than their personal computer. Although the study was completed in 1996, the same holds true today. Every
Some of the mental and physiological effects include constipation, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, confusion, unconsciousness, respiratory depression, risk of heart attack, coma, and even death. Furthermore, the long term use of painkillers can cause addiction. As the body becomes more dependent on a painkiller, the body “adapts to the presence of the substance... [and] build[s] up a tolerance to the drug, meaning that higher doses have to be taken to achieve the same effects” ("Prescription Painkillers”). As a person takes higher and higher doses of the drug, they become addicted and cannot cease taking the drug without facing withdrawal symptoms. Especially in times of stress, the person drawn to the pain-free feeling of painkillers will crave the substance and become reliant on it (“Topics/ Substance Abuse”). In our society, many people have become so used to ingesting these painkillers on a regular basis that they believe they would not be able to function normally without a drug in their