Analgesics are drugs which are used in medicine as pain killers by acting upon the central nervous system and reducing the experience of pain while doing so. The word analgesic has its origins in two Greek words which combined refer to the absence of pain. Although the medical benefits for analgesics are countless there are also severe risks that patients who are treated with this drug will develop an addiction to it. The most popular addictive analgesics come from the opiates family and include morphine and opium.

Doctors are responsible for choosing which analgesic they will administer to a suffering patient according the level of the patient’s pain and the cause of such pain. An excess in the administration of analgesics to a patient might lead not only to the patients addiction to the medication but also to the development of liver and kidney disease, for such reasons a qualified doctor must always supervise the administration of analgesics to patients. The most commonly used analgesic for the elimination of low levels of pain is called aspirin whereas the most strong analgesic used for the decrease of strong, persistent and life threatening pain is called morphine. Unfortunately people who often take analgesics might develop a tolerance for their and they might need to increase the dosage with time in order to achieve the same pain relief that they used to achieve some time ago with a smaller dosage of analgesic meds.