Managing pain is an important part of women's health.  Why?  For one thing, women are typically prone to pain that men do not suffer.  For instance, labor pains are never experienced by men, but many women are clear about their severity and duration.  And even those women who do not have children usually experience menstruation every month.  Although the experience of women varies widely with reference to menstruation pain or cramps, many women do suffer from painful menstrual cramps, each and every month.

Pain relief from such pain as menstrual cramping is typically handled by over-the-counter pain relief medications, such as aspirin, ibuprofen, etc.  Midol is a brand-name medication that many women take for menstrual cramp relief.  It is a well-known cramp remedy.

Some painful situations can be remedied by manipulating the body's physical structure.  One example of this type of pain relief is chiropractic care.  During a chiropractic adjustment, the doctor actually manipulates the patient's body to physically force the skeleton's bones back into proper alignment.  This can be hard, particularly if the patient has been living with her body in an out-of-alignment situation for a long time.  Because her musculature will have responded to this changed (and incorrect) alignment, her musculature will be trying to fight the chiropractor, and keep her alignment out.  It can take several sessions or more before a long-standing condition of physical misalignment can be fixed and the patient brought back to good health.

Massage is another form of physical manipulation of a woman's body to try to bring the patient to a state of improved or better health.  Massage can take many different forms, such as shiatsu, deep tissue massage, and neuro-musculature massage.  Deep tissue massage, for instance, attempts to manipulate the deeper tissue connections in the body so as to bring them into more fortuitous relationship with the neighboring tissue and connective elements.  Massage can vary widely in its health benefits, from the feel-good massage of a general massage practitioner, to the deeply felt and very effective work of deep tissue massage such as Rolfing.

When pain persists, women need to find more effective types of relief.  This is when a health practitioner may prescribe some form of opiate.  These types of drugs are very potent, and quite useful at numbing the pain receptors.  They can make a horrible, life-debilitating painful condition become something that can be tolerated, at least enough to allow the patient to maintain a reasonable lifestyle.

The problem with this type of drug, of course, is that many people have become addicted to these opiate-based medications.  This is a two-fold problem.  First, the patient may find she becomes less effected by the drugs themselves.  This is a typical problem with pain remedy -- they call it drug creep.  Which means it begins to take more and more of a drug in order to give the patient the same amount or degree of pain relief that she first experienced when she started taking the medication.  For instance, if it once too only one pill to give her relief, it can later require two pills to give her the same level of comfort.  Second, now the patient is trying to manage a drug dependency on top of the condition for which she was originally taking the medication.

In general, it is best to seek the least intensive type of therapy or drug treatment that will be effective for the condition being suffered.  For instance, if you can fix your leg cramps by stretching, it's best to stay with that form of leg cramps remedy before trying a course of prescribed medication.

Healthy living is one of the most important aspects of a woman's life.  Women are often getting ensnared by other aspects of life, which they consider more important than good health.  They often think their life revolves around their job, as many women have been trained to believe that their job or career is of primary importance.  They thus make their working life a priority, and often sacrifice good health for their career or job. 

They lose sight of the fact that they can only continue to work successfully if they are in good health.  It is hard if not impossible to go to work when you are sick.  For one think, being sick or in not good health makes every little aspect of going to work just that much harder.  It is hard to get up on time when you are sick and feel horrible.  It takes longer to get ready in the morning when you are sick.  Just the physical pain makes it take longer to do the typical morning toilet and other tasks relating to make up and getting dressed.  Then, once you get to work, all the tasks that make up your job take longer, or are harder, or make you feel worse.  Working can be challenging enough without having to work through a cold or other type of illness.

In addition to your personal difficulties in working while sick, many workplaces are now asking workers not to come to work when they are sick, so as not to infect their coworkers.  In fact, some places reserve the right to make you go home if, in their opinion, you are too sick to be in their workplace.  So good health can be important to just having the right to show up and put in a day's work.  That alone highlights the

importance of good health for women.

 Women are also prone to putting their children ahead of their own good health.  They feel they need to take care of their children, even if they themselves are suffering the pain and consequences of ill health.  This is a noble feeling, and not to be disparaged.  However, it may be somewhat short-sighted.  If you, as the child or children's primary caregiver, are unable to fulfill your duties for a prolonged time, because you got sick in part due to your unwillingness to give yourself the kind of care you needed when you were first feeling ill, then you have perhaps made a poor bargain.  You may have traded a day or two away from your children, for a week or two away from your children when your condition worsens.

Staying in good health can also affect how long a woman lives.  If a woman takes good care of her health, practices good nutrition, gets sufficient exercise, and is of good genetic stock (which she, of course, has no control over), she can live a long time.  Even if her natural health is not the best, she can still prolong her life through preventative health measures, eating good, nutritious food, and getting plenty of exercise (from one-half to one hour per day, at least three days per week).

So as we can see, the first priority for women should be to stay in good health.  And women can best do this by eating fresh, nutritious food, seeing medical practitioners before problems with health develop, and taking enough exercise.