Menstrual Cramps

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Chocolate helps, too...

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Heat Can Help Relieve Menstrual Pain Updated 10:55 AM ET March 1, 2001 By Suzanne Rostler NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Curling up in bed with a heating pad may be as effective as popping ibuprofen to ease the pain of menstrual cramps, researchers report.

It is not entirely clear how heat leads to relief from painful cramps but the study authors suggest that it may alter a woman's threshold for pain in a similar way to placebo, or reduce the activity of the digestive tract leading to a relaxing effect on the uterus.

Dr. Gerson Weiss, a New Jersey-based physician, added that heat may counteract the activity of hormones that cause the uterus to contract.

"Heat is a vasodilator that increases blood flow, which may counteract agents that could cause constriction of blood vessels and cause muscles to contract," Weiss explained to Reuters Health.

Whatever the mechanism, heating devices brought relief from menstrual cramps, according to a report in the March issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Women who used a heated patch and took an inactive pill or placebo reported pain relief equal to that experienced both by women who wore an unheated patch and took 400 milligrams of ibuprofen three times a day, and those who used both heat and drugs.

Furthermore, women reported faster improvement of symptoms when they used both heat and ibuprofen, compared with medication alone, over the 2-day study period. For instance, women who used both therapies reported pain relief after 90 minutes and those who used ibuprofen without heat felt relief nearly 3 hours later, findings show.

"The heat patch therapy is a nondrug treatment that will be most useful for women who have adverse effects from taking systemic oral analgesics," according to study authors Dr. Mark D. Akin from the Health Quest Therapy and Research Institute in Austin, Texas, and colleagues.

Dr. Roger P. Smith, a study author and physician with the Truman Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, noted that heat has been used to treat menstrual pain for generations with hot water bottles and heating pads. But these options were not always practical "because you were either tied down with an electrical cord or the hot water bottle cooled too quickly," he explained. But "the new technology that provides the self-heating devices...allows complete mobility with continuous constant heat."

The report notes that some of the authors are employed by Procter and Gamble, the company that supplied the heating devices investigated in the study.

SOURCE: Obstetrics & Gynecology March 2001.

-- Anonymous, March 01, 2001

Answers

I must have been one of the few visitors to the Caribbean who packed a hot water bottle.

PS.A tot of rum helps too !!!

-- Anonymous, March 01, 2001


staying away from her helps, too.

-- Anonymous, March 01, 2001

Yup, I used a shot of something. Never thought of a heating pad, but then I always had cats.

-- Anonymous, March 01, 2001

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