Now it is time to talk about painkillers. It’s a sad fact of life that not enough doctors are coming through their training and entering general practice. The result is towns and cities find themselves without primary healthcare, an accelerating problem as older doctors retire. This makes pain controversial. How much time does it take to distinguish between the genuine patients who need drugs like tramadol to get a better quality of life, and the drug abusers who want to get high or the dealers looking for product to sell on the streets. There is an alarming rate of prescription medication abuse in the U.S. and the physicians don’t have the time to make a proper diagnosis. The best that they can do is to react to the symptoms described by their patients. That means a quick prescription of tramadol instead of a more holistic approach. As it is, there is a single irony. Patients come to doctors because they cannot cope. The few doctors struggle to cope because so many people are in pain and need help.