Brake the PAIN

Bullet injuries to the body can hurt a lot. The wounds they make in our skin can be very tender.

Depending on how deep they go, they can also cause many different feelings that go from feeling numb to feeling sharp.

At The BRIC, we begin by giving that pain a number.

Pain is both a feeling and an experience. You can’t always change the feeling, but you can change the experience. Often, we think about pain medicine as something we take that will make the pain go away. The truth is, there are many different ways you can “BRAKE THE PAIN”.

Braking the pain is putting the brakes on the many different ways pain can hurt us, using three steps:

PREVENT, CONTROL, TREAT.

INFLAMMATION

Our bodies react to the damage bullets cause in our skin, tissues, muscles, and bones, by a process called inflammation. This is how we repair and heal and this process can be very irritating to our nerves, and can cause more pain. It is not unusual for a bullet injury to hurt WORSE over the first few days after we are injured than it did when we first got shot. We can help cool down inflammation by preventing it in the first place.

IBUPROFEN can help slow down the inflammation. Because of this, it is best to take ibuprofen before the pain gets really bad, as it works best when we use it to prevent pain.

The best way to take Ibuprofen is 600-800mg every 6 hours for the first 2 days after a bullet injury. Then you can switch to taking it as needed, not taking more than 3200mg a day. We suggest taking Ibuprofen if your pain score is higher than 3.

Placing an ICE PACK on any areas that are tender and swollen can help cool down the tissue and make the swelling better.

You can also use a skin cream or oil that is made from a plant called ARNICA. This plant helps with bruising and swelling as well.

If a bullet goes deep enough to injure our muscles and bones it can make our muscles “twitchy”, causing spasms. This is like having a “Charlie Horse” or a really bad cramp. The achy feeling can go on for a long time and can even wake us from sleep.	MAGNESIUM supplements can help control the spasms and improve your relaxation overall. Magnesium is a mineral that is naturally found in your body and in food.
The best way to take Magnesium is 200-400mg every day. This can be in the form of a sugar free gummy that has 100mg of Magnesium Glycinate, like the ones in your BRIC Box pain pack.This can be taken, regardless of your pain score, to be sure the magnesium level in your body is high enough to control muscle spasms.	One of the reasons bullets create spasm is because of the way they hurt nerves. Nerves that are hurt often give off a feeling of “static” like a radio that is not tuned into a station playing music. To help that pain, we can try to give our nerves a different station to tune into.

1. Gently MASSAGE the area

2. Use gentle MOVEMENT

3. Apply gentle COMPRESSION

This includes wrapping arms or legs with BRIC Tape after covering the wound to help control the swelling and protect the wound.

Even if we do our best to prevent and control our pain, sometimes the signals still get to our brain

This may include:

Burning

Numbness

Itching

Stabbing

Sharp

Aching

Cold or Hot

Pressure

And sometimes it hurts in a way that we can’t find a way to even explain. It just hurts. A lot.

We can stop our brains from getting that pain signal from our nerves and tissues, by treating it with “pain medicine”.

ACETAMINOPHEN, often known as “Tylenol”, is a pain medication that can help block those pain signals from getting to the brain.

The best way to take acetaminophen is 1000mg every 6 hours for the first 2 days after a bullet injury. Then you can switch to taking it as needed, not taking more than 4000mg a day. We suggest taking acetaminophen if your pain score is higher than 3.

One of the reasons bullets create spasm is because of the way they hurt nerves. Nerves that are hurt often give off a feeling of “static” like a radio that is not tuned into a station playing music. To help that pain, we can try to give our nerves a different station to tune into.

Often, a prescription for an opioid based pain medication will be given to people with new bullet injuries. This includes medications like percocet and oxycodone. These medications only work to TREAT the pain and do nothing to prevent or control it. They also come with really bad side effects, that include:

Nausea, Constipation, Dizziness, Sleepiness, Feeling Down

While these medications can help make you not care about how severe the pain is, their bad effects will often be worse than their good effects. It is best to use as little of these medications as possible, and to stop using them as soon as possible, to avoid their bad effects.

"Yeah, but will it work?”

Each part of the prevent-control-treat method will not do much for the pain on its own. The power of BRAKING the PAIN is using all three ways together to help stop the pain before it gets too bad.

PAIN IS AN EXPERIENCE AND A TRAUMA RESPONSE

The most important thing to remember is that pain is an experience. It is the way we feel and the things we feel. It is the way our body keeps us safe when we have been threatened or hurt. It is our response to trauma. The more we can calm our bodies and minds, the better our
pain experience will be. When we BRAKE the PAIN we don’t just use medicine to get ourselves to a better pain score. We help our bodies heal.

PREVENT
IBUPROFEN 200MG TABLET
TAKE 3-4 TABLETS EVERY 6 HOURS WITH FOOD
(MAX 16 TABLETS PER DAY)

CONTROL
MAGNESIUM GLYCINATE 100MG GUMMY
TAKE 2 GUMMIES 1-2 TIMES PER DAY
(MAX 4 GUMMIES PER DAY)

TREAT
ACETAMINOPHEN 500MG TABLET
TAKE 2 TABLETS EVERY 6 HOURS
(MAX 8 TABLETS PER DAY)