Pain Relief Without Side Effects and Addiction

[Warpy]

6. I'm also a little leery of this stuff

because I've had the rug jerked out from under me too many times as one of those chronic pain sufferers.

NSAIDs, when they first came out, were the panacea until long term use demonstrated their devastating effect on a lot of body systems, most notably the kidneys. Ditto the COx-2 inhibitors. Tramadol also turned out to be dependence producing (with a side order of SSRI dependence), and we know what a nightmare fentanyl has been.

Good old fashioned vomitous, constipation inducing, dependence producing opiates have proven to the the kindest to body systems, the problem is a social one. That's the dirtiest secret of the drug war, that it was an attempt to fix a problem that didn't really exist and has only served to replace benign drugs with more dangerous ones from the earliest days--it's how we got heroin, the first in a long line of non addictive pain treatments.

Untreated pain is fatal. People in constant pain get to the ends of their ropes and suicide their way to relief. There has got to be a better way than experimenting with a lot of unproven drugs and criminalizing the ones that work and the people who need them.

I stopped believing in panaceas a long time ago. I can see a real problem with this class of drug if it is stopped suddenly, one of rebound. One hope they are looking at this along with the holy grail of relief with no buzz.